[In the following essay, Yeazell examines the milieu of appearances and consumption in which Lily must navigate and which ultimately leads to her downfall.]

Few fictional heroines have been as consistently under observation as Lily Bart, and few heroes have proved such consistent observers as Lawrence Selden.¹ Yet he scarcely registers her most notable performance. Indeed, by the time that Lily drops Bertha Dorset's letters into Selden's fireplace, the very inconspicuousness of the act testifies to its moral significance. In “a world where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society column had become the roll of fame” (II, 3, 168), Lily unobtrusively destroys the evidence that would threaten her principal enemy with exposure—a parcel of adulterous love letters from Bertha to Selden that first came into her hands suitably wrapped in “dirty newspaper” (I, 9, 80). Though Bertha herself has dramatically staged Lily's expulsion from fashionable society in a “strident setting” illuminated by “a special glare of publicity” and duly recorded by “the watchful pen” of the gossip columnist (II, 3, 168, 169), Lily burns the letters in a tranquil room softly lit against the “gathering darkness” (II, 12, 237), and with only the uncomprehending Selden for witness: “When she rose he fancied that he saw her draw something from her dress and drop it into the fire; but he hardly noticed the gesture at the time” (II, 12, 241). As it happens, this will also prove the last time that he sees her alive.²

The House of Mirth opens on a very different vision of its heroine, as Selden's attention is suddenly arrested by the sight of Lily amid the afternoon rush of Grand Central Station. Though the two are already well acquainted, the setting of their first meeting emphasizes Lily's power to draw attention merely as an anonymous spectacle, a spectacle all the more attractive by virtue of its difference from the hurrying and crowded scene. “Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train,” the narrator remarks. “Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room” (I, 1, 5). By the close of the chapter, however, Lily's impulsive acceptance of Selden's invitation to tea in his bachelor quarters will twice subject her to scrutiny of a more unwelcome kind. “There were a thousand chances to one against her meeting anybody,” she thinks sensibly enough on leaving Selden's apartment, but a woman who is conspicuous in Grand Central Station will inevitably attract observation wherever she goes; and in a pattern that will be repeated at several crucial moments in the novel, her slightest deviation from propriety seems guaranteed to turn the anonymous streets of the modern city into the oppressively close byways of an inquisitive small town. Though at first there is “no one in sight … but a char-woman” who looks up “curiously” as she passes (I, 1, 13), the woman's stare follows Lily so persistently that she flushes under the look—and as if help in old New York had already become uncannily scarce, the same woman will later reappear scrubbing the staircase of the house where Lily lives with her aunt. And no sooner does Lily reach the sidewalk, of course, than she encounters the gaze of Simon Rosedale, the ambitious Jew whose “small sidelong eyes … gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac.” Caught off guard by “the sudden intimacy of his smile,” she tries to cover herself by claiming to have been visiting her dressmaker (I, 1, 15), only to have the obviousness of her social lie ironically underlined by Rosedale's revelation that he just happens to own Selden's building. As we shall see, Lily's attempted cover-up involves a further irony, though one that the novelist does not make explicit, since dressmakers, in this world of “rich and conspicuous people” (I, 5, 42-3), at best produce a showy variety of concealment.

Published only a half-dozen years after Thorstein Veblen's mordant analysis of the phenomenon he termed “conspicuous consumption,” Wharton's second novel rivals The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) both as sociology and as satire.³ For Wharton, as for Veblen, the study of the leisure class is above all a study of waste. In a frequently quoted passage from her autobiography, the novelist even suggests that Lily Bart herself exists primarily as a measure of what her culture throws away: because “a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys,” The House of Mirth apparently acquired its heroine.⁴ Like Veblen, Wharton represents a world in which people acquire and maintain status by openly displaying how much they can afford to waste; and like Veblen, she knows that the crowded conditions of modern urban life compel them to make such displays all the more conspicuously. In order to impress the “transient observers” who rush past one in the modern city, Veblen argues, “and to retain one's self-complacency under their observation, the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read.”⁵ So in Wharton's novel, the annual New York Horse Show occasions “a human display of the same costly and highstepping kind as circled daily about its ring”; and Mrs. Gormer, one of the newest of the status-seeking nouveaux riches, seizes the opportunity to advertise her wealth by choosing “the most conspicuous box the house afforded” (II, 8, 203). And while The House of Mirth begins when the attention of the rushing crowd is caught by a woman's “conspicuous” beauty rather than by a sign of “pecuniary strength,” both Wharton and Veblen make clear how the one can stand in for the other—how the woman of the leisure class serves to represent the financial strength of her “master,” as Veblen puts it, by being herself “the chief ornament” in his collection and by vicariously “perform[ing]” conspicuous leisure and consumption for him. Though Veblen rarely approaches this arrangement without his characteristic irony—“the male head of the household,” as he dryly remarks, “is not currently spoken of as its ornament”⁶—it is perhaps not surprising that the novelist proves more alert to the double binds that constrain woman's performance, or that she registers more fully than the economist the psychic costs such performance exacts.

As Veblen describes them, people are insatiably emulative animals, always defining their own success by “invidious” comparisons to others. If the desire to one-up the next person is not the only reason people seek wealth in The Theory of the Leisure Class, it dominates all the rest: in Veblen's speculative account of human history, the competition for wealth has simply come to replace more obvious kinds of “predatory activity” as the arena in which men struggle to prove themselves one another's superiors. Even in a preindustrial age, Veblen contends, the display of property had a symbolic function, but where men used to demonstrate their greater strength in battle or the hunt by showing off the trophies they had managed to capture, they now display their accumulated property as “a trophy of successes scored in the game of ownership.” Though Veblen admits that people can also be motivated merely by the comfort and security wealth brings, he immediately reminds us that even “the standard of sufficiency in these respects is in turn greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary emulation.” One knows what one “needs,” in other words, only by copying others—and one always wants more than one needs in order to surpass them. The theorist of the leisure class undoubtedly lacks the novelist's power of vivid representation, but peering from behind his dry and abstract vocabulary are people also constantly watching one another. “In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men,” he typically writes, “it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence” (Veblen, 28, 32, 36).

In order to gain and hold such esteem most effectively, however, a man should also give as little indication as possible of having labored for the wealth that he puts in evidence. In “archaic” culture, as Veblen hypothesizes it, male hunters and warriors rigorously distinguished their activity from the menial tasks they assigned to women; and a similar “repugnance for the vulgar forms of labour” continued to make itself felt when people passed from the predatory to the industrial stage. Even in the days when the hunt contributed significantly to the sustenance of the group, he argues, men regarded it as a ceremonial and honorific activity more than a productive one; but as soon as settled agriculture made people no longer dependent on various forms of predatory exploit for their livelihood, the distinction became even sharper. Indeed, “from this point on, the characteristic feature of leisure-class life is a conspicuous exemption from all useful employment.” Though a nineteenth-century gentleman might well engage in the ritual entertainment of the hunt—or for that matter go to war—he kept his status as gentleman precisely by showing that he was not involved in productive labor. Note that Veblen takes care to speak of “a conspicuous exemption from all useful employment” (emphasis added): like everyone else, even a gentleman must somehow occupy his time, but in order to prove he has no need to work, he must occupy it nonproductively. As Veblen frequently observes, leisure is itself a kind of employment, and his chapter on “Conspicuous Leisure” amusingly details some of the “quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments” that commonly serve as evidence that one has been engaged in just such an “unproductive expenditure of time”: “the knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of the latest proprieties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and racehorses” (Veblen, 37, 40, 45).

The reader of The House of Mirth might well wish to add to this list a knowledge of Americana—especially as acquired by wealthy collectors like the Gryces. “It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an ugly badly-printed book that one is never going to read!” Lily exclaims when her hopes of marrying the Gryce heir prompt her to quiz Selden about the subject; but the elegant wastefulness of the collector's knowledge is all the more evident because his books are not generally acquired, as Selden observes, in order to be read (I, 1, 11). Percy Gryce, we are told, takes as much pride in the collection “as though it had been his own work,” but of course the very fact that it has not been his own work—he has inherited it from an uncle—only underlines his position as a gentleman. Timid and shy, Percy himself shrinks from public encounters, but the “personal complacency” that he feels whenever he chances on any reference to the Gryce Americana (I, 2, 19) is nonetheless exactly the sort of emotion to which Veblen alludes when he discusses how people constantly engage in “invidious comparison” in order to determine “the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be contemplated by themselves and by others”:⁷

Anxious as he was to avoid personal notice, he took, in the printed mention of his name, a pleasure so exquisite and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his shrinking from publicity.

To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all the reviews dealing with book-collecting in general, and American history in particular, and as allusions to his library abounded in the pages of these journals, which formed his only reading, he came to regard himself as figuring prominently in the public eye, and to enjoy the thought of the interest which would be excited if the persons he met in the street, or sat among in travelling, were suddenly to be told that he was the possessor of the Gryce Americana.

(I, 2, 20)

Only his drastically limited reading could sustain Percy Gryce's illusion of prominence, but his relation to the book-collecting journals caricatures what the novel elsewhere treats with greater seriousness—the way in which “the public eye” is multiplied and magnified through the power of the printed word and of still more modern media like film. Whether or not Veblen intended to conjure up the image of newspaper headlines when he suggested that in the modern city “the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read,” Wharton knew that the culture of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption was also increasingly a culture of mass publicity, and in The House of Mirth, as we shall see, she uneasily registers some effects of their conjunction.

If Veblen's hypothesis about the evolution of masculine honor is correct, the timorous Percy Gryce suggests just how far from the world of “predatory exploit” some gentlemanly specimens have come. Once defined by Lily's cousin as “the young man who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without his overshoes” (I, 2, 18), Percy is nonetheless regarded by the members of Lily's set as a very desirable match—though his personal qualities, or lack of them, are nicely summed up by Judy Trenor's exasperated remark when Lily's campaign to charm him ends in failure: “We could none of us imagine your putting up with him for a moment unless you meant to marry him” (I, 7, 60). Insofar as Lily does mean to marry him—and her intentions on that score are quite ambivalent—she presumably thinks of her future husband much as she thinks of Judy's own, as “a mere supernumerary in the costly show for which his money paid” (I, 7, 68). Less coarse than Gus Trenor and—to all appearances, at least—far less aggressive sexually, Percy Gryce chiefly promises to supply the means by which “she would have smarter gowns than Judy Trenor, and far, far more jewels than Bertha Dorset” (I, 4, 41). As Veblen observes when he too considers the dressing of the leisure class, the woman's function is “to put in evidence her household's ability to pay” and thereby to sustain “the good name of the household to which she belongs” (Veblen, 180). And this is precisely what Lily imagines herself doing when she determines to take the place of the Gryce Americana—to be to Percy “the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it.” Lily “resolved so to identify herself with her husband's vanity,” Wharton writes, “that to gratify her wishes would be to him the most exquisite form of self-indulgence” (I, 4, 41), as if the “exquisite” pleasure Percy now feels when he sees his name in print (I, 2, 20) were in the future to be aroused instead by the woman who triumphantly carried that name in public. As Lily's husband, the simultaneously vain and timid Percy could continue to feel himself at once safely hidden and gloriously displayed—even as he felt himself paradoxically “secure in the shelter of her conspicuousness” when she elegantly made tea for him in the public train (I, 2, 18).

Percy Gryce owes his leisure to the fortune he has inherited from his father, a fortune “which the late Mr. Gryce had made,” Wharton mischievously informs us, “out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels.” After the death of Jefferson Gryce, the mother and son leave their native Albany and settle in New York, where Percy dutifully spends his weekdays being “initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation” by the “batch of pale men on small salaries” who have hitherto managed the Gryce estate (I, 2, 21). By the standards of the Old World, this is very new money indeed, but in comparison to most of the wealthy men in The House of Mirth, Percy Gryce possesses a hallowed claim to the status of gentleman. Though Veblen technically distinguishes between the middle classes, where men work hard so that their wives can vicariously perform their leisure for them, and the leisure class proper, where both sexes conspicuously abstain from productive labor, the world of The House of Mirth is largely a world of women. It is they who produce the “impressions” by which social ascent is finally measured—as Lily implicitly recognizes when she regrets not having purchased Rosedale's silence after their awkward encounter by allowing herself to be seen with him at the train station, or when she later tries to appease him by taking a “conspicuous” walk with him at the Van Osburgh wedding (I, 8, 77). And as Rosedale himself will in turn come to recognize, the subtleties and refinement of a woman like Lily—her very superiority to “mere display” (I, 4, 34)—only intensify the worth of such occasions. “He had his race's accuracy in the appraisal of values,” the narrator comments of Rosedale, after Lily snubs him in front of Selden's apartment, “and to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded afternoon hour in the company of Miss Lily Bart would have been money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it” (I, 2, 15). As Veblen would have predicted, however, the refinement of Rosedale's own powers of discrimination keeps pace with his social progress; and neither his view of Lily, nor our view of him, will be quite this crude by the novel's end. Rosedale's feeling for “shades of difference” (I, 11, 96) may never quite match Lily's “affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth” (I, 4, 34), but he knows full well when he proposes to her that “it's only the showy things that are cheap” (I, 15, 140); and by their final encounter he will even have come to admire her “scruples and resistances” as much as her “delicacy of feature” and “fastidiousness of manner”—“as though he were a collector who had learned to distinguish minor differences of design and quality in some long-coveted object” (II, 11, 234).⁸

Though Lily does not finally find a “collector” either in Gryce or in Rosedale, the novel repeatedly emphasizes that she has no other function, that the position of leisure-class marker is the only one she knows how to fill. “Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose,” the narrator remarks when Lily later tries and fails to earn her living as a milliner. “It was bitter to acknowledge her inferiority even to herself, but the fact had been brought home to her that as a breadwinner she could never compete with professional ability” (II, 11, 232). Yet as Veblen likes to remind us by frequently comparing the leisure-class wife and the liveried servant, the painstaking display of uselessness for which such a woman has been raised is itself a kind of job, an elaborate “performance” on behalf of another. Neither a gentleman's wife nor his footman, for instance, is principally engaged in productive labor, but both are “dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him,” and both may devote considerable time and effort to the task of display for which they have been hired. “The leisure of the servant is not his own leisure,” Veblen remarks, but “a specialised service directed to the furtherance of his master's fulness of life”; and “so long as the household with a male head remains in force,” the wife too “is still primarily a servant,” one who “should not only perform certain offices” but demonstrate “the effects of special training and practice in subservience” (Veblen, 80, 60). While Wharton occasionally writes as if women like Lily were trained to be altogether incapable of work—the language of such passages merely reflecting the familiar identification of “work” with openly paid employment—the novel as a whole clearly shares Veblen's perception.⁹ As a hanger-on in the households of her wealthy friends, practiced in the minor forms of “social drudgery” and accustomed to be “in bondage to other people's pleasure,” Lily is perpetually in training for the role she never assumes; and “in her bitter moods,” the narrator observes, “it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly” (I, 3, 24). When Lily does briefly work for regular wages at Mme. Regina's, she deliberately chooses to engage in productive labor, hoping to learn the trade of hat making and avoid having to accept the modeling job the proprietor would have preferred to offer her. Though Lily's “charming listless hands” prove useless at the task, we have no reason to question the soundness of Mme. Regina's original judgment: “As a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset” (II, 10, 221, 222).

Tending as it does to make her own person the principal object of her labor, a woman's conspicuous display of herself is nonetheless work of a very peculiar kind—a fact to which Wharton is understandably more sensitive than Veblen. The theorist of the leisure class knows quite well that he lives in a “patriarchal régime” which still treats a woman as her husband's “chattel,” and he is particularly shrewd about the way in which her dress serves to emphasize the fact by obviously disabling her from any independent activity: “The high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilised women's apparel,” Veblen characteristically remarks, “are so many items of evidence to the effect that in the modern civilised scheme of life the woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man” (Veblen, 70, 71, 181-2). Concerned as he is with woman's conspicuous uselessness, however, Veblen scarcely seems to notice how the cult of her physical beauty contributes to her status as an object, or to remark that the more attractive a woman, the greater her value as a vehicle of display.

Apart from complaining to Selden that “we are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop” (I, 1, 12), Lily herself never seems to register any particular discomfort regarding her clothes, though Selden, watching her pour tea in his apartment, imagines “the links of her bracelet … like manacles chaining her to her fate” and her hand itself significantly “polished as a bit of old ivory” (I, 1, 8). After Lily alludes jokingly to a potential mother-in-law's fear that she might have had “all the family jewels reset,” he notes “with a purely impersonal enjoyment, how evenly the black lashes were set in her smooth white lids” (I, 1, 10). Earlier, when they first set out on the walk from Grand Central Station, he had “a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make” (I, 1, 7). Nor, of course, is Selden the only one who thus confuses the beautiful woman with a valuable crafted object. “If I want a thing I'm willing to pay,” Rosedale announces when he proposes to Lily: “I don't go up to the counter, and then wonder if the article's worth the price.” After Mr. Bart's bankruptcy and death, Mrs. Bart thought of Lily's beauty as “the last asset in their fortunes” and “watched it jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian” (I, 3, 29). But we hardly need the particular facts of her family history to explain how Lily too comes to think of her beauty as an impersonal thing: as feminist critics have been quick to observe, such objectification of woman's beauty only exaggerates the values of the culture.¹⁰ “Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience,” Wharton writes; “her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end” (I, 4, 41). Like Lily's obsessive mirror gazing, the sort of alienation registered by these impersonal pronouns is so familiar as almost to pass without notice—as is the way in which the beautiful heroine serves the novelist both as wish fulfillment and moralistic warning. But if Lily's trust in her beauty is meant to be unfounded, her appraisal of what she has to display is all too accurate. Lily “fails” on the marriage market because she finally resists the impulse to sell herself, not because she judges the values of that market inaccurately.¹¹

As we have already seen, the New York of this novel proves in one sense terrifyingly limited—a world so narrow and intimate that Lily can scarcely take a step without encountering someone she knows. But The House of Mirth also represents a leisure class in the process of rapid expansion, and anxiously foresees how its opportunities for display will be many times magnified by the instruments of modern publicity. When Wharton imagines her characters displaying themselves, she thinks of newspapers and fashion journals, “a blaze of electric light,” photographs in the “Sunday Supplements” (II, 9, 213, 214)—and even the motion picture camera ready to roll at the Van Osburgh wedding:

It was the “simple country wedding” to which guests are conveyed in special trains, and from which the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by the intervention of the police. While these sylvan rites were taking place, in a church packed with fashion and festooned with orchids, the representatives of the press were threading their way, notebook in hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents, and the agent of a cinematograph syndicate was setting up his apparatus at the church door. It was the kind of scene in which Lily had often pictured herself as taking the principal part, and on this occasion the fact that she was once more merely a casual spectator, instead of the mystically veiled figure occupying the centre of attention, strengthened her resolve to assume the latter part before the year was over.

(I, 8, 69)

The line that separates a bride from a silent film star seems thin indeed; and though Lily never does get the part, she will later discover that she nonetheless had her fans. “I used to watch for your name in the papers, and we'd talk over what you were doing, and read the descriptions of the dresses you wore,” Nettie Struther declares, explaining how she named her baby “Marry Anto'nette” because the actress who played the doomed queen reminded her of Lily (II, 13, 244). Listening to the casual chatter with which her fellow workers at Mme. Regina's pass the time, Lily has already learned something of how the city's less conspicuous inhabitants follow the lives of the rich and the famous:

On and on it flowed, a current of meaningless sound, on which, startlingly enough, a familiar name now and then floated to the surface. It was the strangest part of Lily's strange experience, the hearing of these names, the seeing the fragmentary and distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in the mirror of the working-girls' minds. She had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence. Every girl in Mme. Regina's work-room knew to whom the headgear in her hands was destined, and had her opinion of its future wearer, and a definite knowledge of the latter's place in the social system. That Lily was a star fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of curiosity had subsided, materially add to their interest in her. She had fallen, she had “gone under,” and true to the ideal of their race, they were awed only by success—by the gross tangible image of material achievement.

(II, 10, 223)

Though their measure of success remains that of conspicuous consumption (“the gross tangible image of material achievement”), these workers discuss the women of the leisure class with the same casual avidity with which we gossip about movie stars and rock musicians; and as in our case, the thrill of the gossip derives from a peculiar mixture of distance and intimacy. Compared to a modern fan, who typically “knows” her celebrities only through the media, an employee at Mme. Regina's has a relatively direct relation to the objects of her curiosity: she still makes hats with her own hands, after all, for the heads of those she talks about. But Wharton also emphasizes that those who circulate in the “social system” know nothing of the “underworld” that observes them, while only the glorious remoteness of the leisured heavens catches the attention of the workers: the fallen star has no power to interest them.

Despite the presence of the cinematographer at the Van Osburgh wedding, The House of Mirth can only anticipate the possibilities of modern publicity: if Lily is a kind of star, her most triumphant performance still takes the form of a tableau vivant at a private house party, and the painting she chooses to recreate is an elegantly simple eighteenth-century portrait. But since the Brys hope “to attack society collectively” by putting on “a general entertainment,” and since their newly constructed mansion has rooms “immense” enough to accommodate a “throng,” the distinction between private and public life is not very great (I, 12, 103, 104). Indeed, even before the tableaux begin, Wharton suggests, the Brys' domestic interior can scarcely be distinguished from a stage set: “So recent, so rapidly-evoked was the whole mise-en-scène that one had to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat one's self in one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted against the wall” (I, 12, 104). At once a kind of dramatic performance and a sequence of static, museumlike displays, the tableaux vivants merely exaggerate the ordinary forms of leisure-class life; and Lily, as we might expect, “was in her element on such occasions” (I, 12, 103). Simply clothed in the pale and flowing draperies of the Reynolds portrait, she does not so much transcend the world of conspicuous display as show off her superior refinement—a fitting emblem of the “spiritualisation of the scheme of symbolism in dress” which Veblen identifies with the highest reaches of the pecuniary culture.¹² “In that plain white dress,” the newly discriminating Rosedale later tells her, she looked as if she “had a crown on” (I, 15, 140). In that dress she also exhibits her own figure to best advantage—as the cruder comments of “that experienced connoisseur,” Ned Van Alstyne, clearly register: “What's a woman want with jewels when she's got herself to show? The trouble is that all these fal-bals they wear cover up their figures when they've got 'em. I never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has” (I, 13, 106, 109). Like the actress who manages to represent an imaginary character even as she reminds the viewer all the more intensely of her own identity, Lily paradoxically succeeds as Reynolds's “Mrs. Lloyd” by giving the audience “a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.” In the other tableaux, the narrator observes, “the personality of the actors [had] been subdued to the scenes they figured in,” but “here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality. … She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself” (I, 12, 106). When Gerty Farish innocently observes of the Reynolds costume that “it makes her look like the real Lily” (I, 12, 107; emphasis added), she unwittingly sums up the difficulties of locating depths in this world of appearances, a world in which the “real” self keeps threatening to prove just another conspicuous performance.

In a still more nightmarish version of the novel's opening sequence, Lily's triumphant self-display quickly yields to a more threatening scene of observation, when Gus Trenor tricks her into visiting him alone the following evening. Long chafing at Lily's failure to return any sexual favors for the money he has advanced (it turns out he has invested in her rather than for her), Trenor is driven to proprietary outrage by the very spectacle of her public exhibition: “I went to that damned vulgar party just to see you,” he drunkenly complains, “and there was everybody talking about you, and asking me if I'd ever seen anything so stunning, and when I tried to come up and say a word, you never took any notice, but just went on laughing and joking with a lot of asses who only wanted to be able to swagger about afterward, and look knowing when you were mentioned” (I, 13, 112). Significantly, that which certifies Lily's value as conspicuous waste only increases her vulnerability; and Trenor's assault is checked not by “her helpless useless hands” but by the timely intervention of a figurative “hand of inherited order” that “plucked back the bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts” (I, 12, 117). Yet if this attempted rape is the most obvious and brutal consequence of her glorious display the previous evening, Selden's glimpse of her as she leaves the Trenor house proves more insidiously devastating.¹³ Though she physically manages to elude Trenor's grasp, she does not escape the imputations of having been seen in his presence, nor does she ever know that she needs to defend herself from this more insidious assault, which is so much more typical of the novel. Indeed, Wharton intensifies the painfulness of the episode by giving it to us twice, once from Lily's point of view, as she confronts Trenor and then flees in misery to Gerty Farish, and again from Selden's, as he walks with Ned Van Alstyne late at night down Fifth Avenue:

The walking-stick which Van Alstyne swung … dropped to a startled “Hallo!” as the door opened and two figures were seen silhouetted against the hall-light. At the same moment a hansom halted at the curbstone, and one of the figures floated down to it in a haze of evening draperies; while the other, black and bulky, remained persistently projected against the light.

For an immeasurable second the two spectators of the incident were silent; then the house-door closed, the hansom rolled off, and the whole scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereopticon.

(I, 14, 127)

As when she left Selden's apartment and encountered Rosedale, Lily seems unable to step out into the street without being recognized—only this time it is Selden who ironically happens by as witness. Both spectators of this silent tableau have just heard Jack Stepney complain of her “standing there as if she was up at auction” at the previous evening's performance (I, 14, 124); now they chance upon this second briefly illuminated scene, and “as if with the turn of a stereopticon,” it destroys Selden's already fragile faith in Lily. Instead of coming to her rescue the next day with a proposal of marriage, he catches the first boat for Havana. Though he will next appear at Monte Carlo, in the second book of the novel, in time to catch the spectacular crowd scenes whose climax is the dramatic staging of Lily's ostracism, this silent pantomine in New York opens the final rift between them. Only when Selden discovers the check made out to Trenor that Lily leaves behind at her death does he belatedly begin to realize that his interpretation of the scene might be mistaken.

By beginning the novel's second book with a spectacle that produces the effect of a closing tableau, Wharton self-consciously calls attention to the way in which the Monte Carlo scenes resemble the grand finale of her heroine's conspicuous career. Several episodes will intervene before Lily's lonely death in a New York boardinghouse, but each only marks a further phase of the social descent that clearly begins with her ignominious expulsion from Bertha's yacht. When Selden arrives at Monte Carlo, the cast has been assembled as for the final crowd scene:

It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its climax and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens would soon dissolve and re-form in other scenes. Meanwhile the last moments of the performance seemed to gain an added brightness from the hovering threat of the curtain. The quality of the air, the exuberance of the flowers, the blue intensity of sea and sky, produced the effect of a closing tableau, when all the lights are turned on at once. This impression was presently heightened by the way in which a consciously conspicuous group of people advanced to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the air of the chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the final effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance to one of those “costume-plays” in which the protagonists walk through the passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood in unrelated attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the men hung about them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors are named in the programme.

(II, 1, 143-4)

The passage suggests a reprise of the New York tableaux, except that there is no longer even the pretense of a distinction between the costume play on stage and the costume play off: for the “consciously conspicuous” members of the leisure class, after all, a resort like Monte Carlo exists entirely for show. Not surprisingly, we soon learn that “Lily has been a tremendous success” in these repeat performances (II, 1, 146). But what commences in one kind of conspicuousness for the novel's heroine ends with the other, as Bertha's deliberate timing converts a scene of celebrity into the public staging of a scandal.

Bertha takes care to perform her dramatic gesture in the middle of a fashionable restaurant, a theatrical space “crowded” with people “gathered … for the purpose of spectatorship, and accurately posted as to the names and faces of the celebrities they had come to see” (II, 3, 168). And as so often in The House of Mirth, a representative of the press is on hand to heighten the “glare of publicity” (II, 3, 168). If “Town Talk was full of her this morning,” as Jack Stepney complains the day after her performance at the Brys' (I, 14, 124), “Riviera Notes” threatens to be still more ominously full of Lily tomorrow, since “the whole scene had touches of intimacy worth their weight in gold to the watchful pen of Mr. Dabham” (II, 3, 169). In Dabham, the insistent watchfulness of the novel becomes an active predatory force: “His little eyes were like tentacles thrown out to catch the floating intimations with which, to Selden, the air at moments seemed thick.”¹⁴ Though the anxious Selden tries to persuade himself that the scene will afford the reporter nothing but “leisure to note the elegance of the ladies' gowns”—the “surprises and subtleties” of Bertha's in particular seem to him to “challenge … all the wealth of Mr. Dabham's vocabulary” (II, 3, 168)—Bertha's gown soon proves less subtle and surprising than the woman herself, and the conspicuous waste of her dress fades before her dramatic contribution to the wasting of Lily.

By the time that Lily returns to New York, the scandal has preceded her, and the damage has irretrievably spread. Translating a social cut into a cut in hard currency, Mrs. Peniston's decision to disinherit her niece at once confirms and reproduces Mrs. Dorset's gesture, even as the space that widens about Lily when the other women fall back from her after the reading of the will exaggerates her “slightly isolated position” and the “averted looks” of the women in the earlier scene (II, 3, 169, 170). “The truth about any girl is that once she's talked about she's done for,” Lily sums up her situation to Gerty Farish (II, 4, 176)—a rule that suspiciously resembles those “copy-book axioms” she has earlier associated with her aunt and impatiently dismissed as “all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties” (I, 1, 9-10). Though Lily never specifies which axioms she has in mind, the “truth” she cites is unmistakably one of Mrs. Peniston's: “It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about” (I, 11, 100). But if, as Lily has begun to discover, such old-fashioned axioms still painfully apply, the real “truth about any girl” is that her position is impossible to begin with, since the rules in her aunt's copy-book condemn precisely what the leisure class requires of its beautiful women. Indeed, books directed at the marriageable young woman had long taken as axiomatic that she should not be seen and talked about—that “the flagrant affectation of shining in public,” as a Young Lady's Book of Advice and Instruction put it in 1859, could lead only to disaster. “Beauty, by being patent to the public eye, becomes valueless,” according to the author of this book:

I never knew a man, who would willingly choose for his bosom companion, one who was often perambulating the streets, or exhibiting herself at public places. …

The attractions of a beautiful woman are sure to suffer, if seen too frequently; modest reserve, like the distance kept by royal personages, contributes to maintain the proper reverence. Nothing can be more impolitic in young ladies, than to make themselves too cheap.¹⁵

Rather, “that retiring delicacy which avoids the public eye, and is disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration, is the most powerful charm of woman,” the book suggests on another page. “It is the safeguard and protection of all feminine virtues, and she who is under the restraint of modesty, is secure from every evil tendency.”¹⁶ In Mrs. Peniston's youth, such wisdom could have been found in hundreds of places; and we hardly need imagine that she read this particular tome of Advice and Instruction to recognize how something very like its assumptions prompts her outraged reaction to the rumors that involve her niece—or to recognize how directly such axioms contradict the unstated laws of leisure-class consumption and display. Notice how, according to the advice book, the public exhibition of the young lady's beauty threatens to make her too “cheap”—an economic law that altogether inverts the theory of values articulated by Veblen. Of course, the book advised young women still on the market, whereas Veblen studies the role of those already purchased in marriage: The Young Lady's Book urged a woman to keep herself scarce in order to drive up her price, while The Theory of the Leisure Class analyzes how she helps men to show off what prices they can afford to pay. But even conduct books assumed that the marriageable young woman had to “come out” in order to display herself most effectively, and even the more cynical members of the married leisure class, as The House of Mirth suggests, were capable of deliberately exploiting the modesty rules for the making of scandal. And if a double bind seizes women most forcibly as they attempt to move from one officially approved state to another, Wharton heightens the tension by imagining a heroine who has already been too long on the market: a “jeune fille à marier” of twenty-nine, and shop-worn enough to joke about it, is especially vulnerable (I, 6, 56).

Well before Bertha Dorset accuses Lily of having been “so conspicuously” alone with George Dorset late at night in Monte Carlo (II, 2, 161), Grace Stepney begins to alienate Mrs. Peniston from her niece by passing on rumors that have been circulating about the latter's relation to Gus Trenor. “People always say unpleasant things,” she remarks with a complacent sense of her worldly superiority to Mrs. Peniston—“and certainly they're a great deal together,” she adds maliciously. “It's a pity Lily makes herself so conspicuous.”

“Conspicuous!” gasped Mrs. Peniston. She bent forward, lowering her voice to mitigate the horror. “What sort of things do they say? That he means to get a divorce and marry her?”

Grace Stepney laughed outright. “Dear me, no! He would hardly do that. It—it's a flirtation—nothing more.”

“A flirtation? Between my niece and a married man?”

(I, 11, 98)

Wharton makes clear that this is old New York speaking—and that the closed and comparatively small town of Mrs. Peniston's girlhood is rapidly disappearing into the speed and crowds of the modern city. Significantly enough, Mrs. Peniston never figures in those large throngs of spectators who gaze admiringly on her niece. Indeed, so far as we can tell, she scarcely ever ventures beyond her drawing room, where she keeps her imagination as “shrouded,” the narrator suggests, as the furniture (I, 11, 98). Yet Mrs. Peniston too, of course, is a watcher—a “looker-on at life” whose mind has earlier been figured as “one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was happening in the street” (I, 3, 32). Her New York has no rush hours at Grand Central Station, in other words, just those villagelike streets into which her niece keeps stepping at awkward moments, streets whose only occupant proves always, however implausibly, someone she knows. Caught between the imperative to display herself and the injunction to keep herself modestly out of sight, Lily dies, one might say, partly because she lives in both Veblen's city and Mrs. Peniston's.¹⁷

In the later chapters of The House of Mirth, and in occasional retrospective remarks on the novel to others, Wharton sometimes evokes its old New York with a certain incongruous nostalgia—as if by comparison to the spectacularly vulgar standards of the newest nouveaux riches, Mrs. Peniston's copy-book axioms had suddenly been converted into satisfactory guides to the moral life. “Compared with the vast gilded void of Mrs. Hatch's existence,” for example, “the life of Lily's former friends seemed packed with ordered activities.” Confronted with the multiply divorced and very wealthy Mrs. Hatch, who arrives from somewhere vaguely out west to swim “in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy world of sport,” Lily suddenly discovers that “even the most irresponsible pretty woman of her acquaintance had her inherited obligations, her conventional benevolences, her share in the working of the great civic machine; and all hung together in the solidarity of these traditional functions” (II, 9, 215). In an often-quoted valedictory passage, the narrator deplores Lily's “rootless and ephemeral” life, her lack of “grave endearing traditions” and a “centre of early pieties,” implicitly comparing the House of Mirth to “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” (II, 13, 248). Writing about the novel to the rector of New York's Trinity Church a few months after it was published, Wharton similarly appeared to suggest that her subject was the difference between the traditional loyalties of the old money and the rootlessness of the new: “Social conditions as they are just now in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast & absorbing field for the novelist.”¹⁸ At such moments it is almost as if Wharton wanted to forget the collusion of old money and new that she had in fact represented, or as if she could somehow undo her heroine's fate by substituting a consoling image of the past for the world of “inherited obligations” she had already satirized in Mrs. Peniston.

The most vivid thing about her was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van Alstyne. This connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New York revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room and in the excellence of her cuisine. She belonged to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well, dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed.

(I, 3, 32)

Wharton sometimes writes as if “the sudden possession of money” marked a great divide between this old world and the new, but she knows as well as Veblen himself did that the leisure class is an archaic institution. Mrs. Peniston might register shock at Mrs. Dorset's gambling, not to mention her adulteries, but both women recognize an obligation to live well and dress expensively; and from beyond the grave, as we have seen, the older woman reenacts the younger one's cut of Lily.

Wharton similarly confuses an older world with the new in a letter of the same year, even as she protests to her Bostonian correspondent against the suggestion that she has “‘stripped’ New York society” in her novel:

New York society is still amply clad, & the little corner of its garment that I lifted was meant to show only that little atrophied organ—the group of idle & dull people—that exists in any big & wealthy social body. If it seems more conspicuous in New York than in an old civilization, it is because the whole social organization with us is so much smaller & less elaborate—& if, as I believe, it is more harmful in its influence, it is because fewer responsibilities attach to money with us than in other societies.

How a “little atrophied organ” could seem “conspicuous”—even after the novelist has metaphorically lifted a corner of a garment to reveal it—is simply not clear, unless she is actually so bold as to mean the male genitals of New York. Indeed, this uneasy figure makes it impossible to decide what class of people she professes to have indicted. Though Wharton could well argue that a parvenu like Norma Hatch only seems conspicuous because New York is a comparatively small and uncomplicated civilization, the group of “idle & dull people” seems rather to evoke Mrs. Peniston's set—and so, of course, do the suggestions of age and sexual withering in “that little atrophied organ.” In the letter as elsewhere, what does seem clear is the writer's anxiety to distance herself from the aggressive implications of her own satire. “Forgive this long discourse,” she continues, “but you see I had to come to the defense of my own town, which, I assure you, has many mansions outside of the little House of Mirth.”¹⁹ There are “many mansions,” however, in The House of Mirth, and little suggestion of any “society” outside them. Between the oppressive darkness of Mrs. Peniston's drawing room—the past of Wharton's memory, it is tempting to suggest, rather than of her pious wishes—and the vulgar glare of a place like the Emporium Hotel, where the notorious Mrs. Hatch takes up residence, the novel does not really offer its heroine anything to choose.²⁰

In The House of Mirth, it often seems, everyone is a “looker-on” and only appearances count.²¹ As Simon Rosedale rather brutally makes clear when he declines to renew his marriage proposal to Lily, what matters is not the truth about Lily, but how she looks to others. “If they are not true,” Lily asks of the stories that have been circulating about her, “doesn't that alter the situation?” “I believe it does in novels,” Rosedale steadily replies, “but I'm certain it don't in real life” (II, 7, 199, 200). Like so many novelists, Wharton professes to give us not fiction but “real life”—and with the further paradox that reality in The House of Mirth is highly artificial. The brutal truth she emphasizes is that Lily lives in a world of stage sets and mirrors, where even false stories can kill.²² But like any novelist who professes to give us “real life,” Wharton also takes advantage of the possibilities of fiction: insisting that in Lily Bart's world only appearances count, she nonetheless offers us an interior view, the privileged access to another's consciousness that only fiction can provide. Unlike all those who watch Lily Bart, we alone know, for example, that she chooses to burn Bertha's letters rather than to use them; and for us, at least, such knowledge does make a difference. That difference should not be exaggerated: what the novel actually gives us through its heroine is not an alternative vision, just the faltering pulse of resistance, which the novelist and reader register to the bitter end. Consciousness in The House of Mirth primarily defines itself by negating the world of appearances.

Notes

1. This essay originally appeared in ELH 59 (1992): 713-34. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged.

2. For a related discussion of Lily's resistance to being watched as she burns Bertha's letters, see Barbara Hochman, “The Rewards of Representation: Edith Wharton, Lily Bart and the Writer/Reader Interchange,” Novel 24 (1991): 157-8. Hochman interprets Lily's covert gesture in this scene as a defiant renunciation of the audience on which her existence has hitherto depended and as a sign of Wharton's own ambivalent relation to her readers. Though Hochman also calls the burning of the letters “an affirmation of the luxurious wastefulness [Lily] has always longed to indulge” (157), the very inconspicuousness of the gesture disqualifies it as an act of wasting in the Veblenesque sense elaborated here.

3. To the best of my knowledge, Wharton never specifically mentions having read The Theory of the Leisure Class, but, as we shall see, the evidence of The House of Mirth strongly suggests that she was familiar with its arguments and its vocabulary. For some other uses of Veblen to illuminate the novel, see Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 28-31; Amy Kaplan, “Edith Wharton's Profession of Authorship,” ELH 53 (1986): 434-5; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 130-1, 137-9, 143-4; and, briefly, Cynthia Griffin Wolff's introduction to Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), xxi-xxii.

4. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Appleton, 1934), 207.

5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Modern Library, 1934), 87. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition.

6. Veblen, 180. As a number of critics have observed, an earlier title for The House of Mirth was “A Moment's Ornament.” See R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 109.

7. Veblen, 34. “Complacency” is another key word in Veblen's vocabulary; compare (among numerous other instances) the phrase “in order … to retain one's self-complacency” quoted earlier. Though Wharton does not ring as many changes on the word as she does on “conspicuous,” she again uses it in Veblen's sense when Lily tries to reassure an anxious Judy Trenor that her renown as a hostess will not suffer from invidious comparisons to Maria Van Osburgh. “You know perfectly well that, if Mrs. Van Osburgh were to get all the right people and leave you with all the wrong ones, you'd manage to make things go off, and she wouldn't,” Lily protests—on which the narrator comments: “Such an assurance would usually have restored Mrs. Trenor's complacency; but on this occasion it did not chase the cloud from her brow” (I, 4, 36). Compare also the satisfaction Lily takes in the attentions of the relatively vulgar Wellington Brys after the failure of her campaign for Percy Gryce: “Mrs. Bry's admiration was a mirror in which Lily's self-complacency recovered its lost outline. … If these people paid court to her it proved that she was still conspicuous in the world to which they aspired” (I, 10, 88-9).

8. Compare Veblen's similar observation about the refinement of taste that develops when a sufficiently large number of people have “the leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of expenditure” (187).

9. Compare to Ammons, 30-3.

10. On Lily's relation to herself as a beautiful object, see especially Judith Fetterley, “‘The Temptation to be a Beautiful Object’: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth,” Studies in American Fiction 5 (1977): 199-211; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford, 1978), 112-33.

11. For a very different view of Lily's relation to the market, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 228-34. In Michaels's account, Lily most closely shares the values of the market when she most appears to oppose them—when she refuses Rosedale's suggestion that she blackmail Bertha and marry him, for example, or even when she decides to swallow the dose of chloral that finally destroys her. What such acts have in common is Lily's deliberate assumption of risk, a “passion for gambling,” Michaels contends, that “is an expression of her passion for the market” (230) and by implication, at least, of the novelist's own values as well. While his reading brilliantly evokes the attractions of indeterminacy for Lily and Wharton alike (Lily is most “interesting” to herself when she doesn't quite know what she's up to), it is less effective in explaining why the novel consistently associates such risk taking with self-destruction. The argument advanced here is closer to that of Wai-Chee Dimock, “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,” PMLA 100 (1985): 783-91. Dimock sees the burning of the letters as a gesture of resistance to the exchange system, even as she makes clear how the novel renders all such gestures futile.

12. Veblen, 187. As the leisure class develops, in Veblen's words, “the method of advertisement undergoes a refinement,” and “‘loud’ dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar.”

13. See Kaplan, “Edith Wharton's Profession”: “It is no accident that Trenor's attempted rape in the privacy of an empty drawing room follows this scene [the Bry tableaux], collapsing the line between public display of the self as art and the private vulnerability of the lady at home” (449).

14. Though in this passage it seems scarcely possible—or necessary—to distinguish Selden's view of Dabham from Wharton's, I would not like to suggest that we should regularly identify the hero's viewpoint with that of the novel as a whole. Indeed, despite Selden's subsequent desire to “grip Dabham by the collar and fling him out into the street,” the cynical watchfulness of the novel's hero has all too much in common with that of the gossip columnist. Note, for example, how Selden immediately begins to speculate about what “weakness” of Lily's has prompted this scene, as his “reason obstinately harped on the proverbial relation between smoke and fire” (II, 3, 169, 170).

15. The Young Lady's Book of Advice and Instruction (Glasgow and London: W. R. M'Phun, 1859), 30, 28-9.

16. The Young Lady's Book, 11-12. According to this work, “the chief ornament of the female character is modesty” (11)—a commonplace formula worth comparing to Wharton's satiric allusion to the marriageable young woman as “a moment's ornament” (see note 6). For a more extensive treatment of the double binds implicit in such rhetoric, see my Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

17. When Diana Trilling writes of “Mrs. Wharton's, and Lily's, society,” that “their New York is very much a small town where everyone knows everyone else and where the boundaries even upon one's physical movements are rigidly prescribed,” she clearly has Mrs. Peniston in mind; indeed, she goes on to assert that Lily's aunt “can sit at her window and be as well-informed of the comings and goings of her acquaintances as if she were still young and active,” though this rather literalizes Wharton's metaphor. But Mrs. Peniston's New York is not—or not simply, at least—Lily's and Wharton's: as I have tried to show, theirs is also the Veblenesque city of conspicuous consumption. Trilling shrewdly remarks Lily's “inability to evade the eyes of the world and lose herself in the crowd,” but fails to register what Wharton knows all too well: how much Lily's culture simultaneously encourages her to court the eyes she would evade. See “The House of Mirth Revisited,” in Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Irving Howe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 115.

18. To Dr. Morgan Dix, December 5 [1905], in The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (London: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 99.

19. To William Roscoe Thayer, November 11 [1905], in Wharton, Letters, 96-7.

20. For a related account of how Wharton's “essentially aristocratic critique” of the marketplace cannot sustain itself, see Dimock: “And yet, even as she articulates her ideal, she sees that it does not exist, and indeed has never existed, either in her own experience or in Lily's” (790).

21. See also Nancy Topping Bazin, “The Destruction of Lily Bart: Capitalism, Christianity, and Male Chauvinism,” Denver Quarterly 17 (1983): 98. “Even more ironic,” Bazin remarks of Lily's relation to her “frivolous” society, “is the fact that she is eventually excluded from that world for appearing to do what married women in that milieu actually did with impunity—namely, have affairs and borrow money.” This criticism is undoubtedly just, though Lily's temptation to blackmail suggests that even the impunity of a Bertha Dorset was drastically limited, and that married women too depended on a precarious manipulation of appearances.

22. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 173-81.