SOURCE: "Male Vision and Female Revision in James's The Wings of the Dove and Wharton's The House of Mirth," in Women's Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1984, pp. 227-44.

[In the following essay, Karcher asserts that The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton 's attempt to reclaim female authorship and authority—her own and that of her women characters—-from Henry James's "angel-monster" dichotomy in The Wings of the Dove.]

In their groundbreaking study of female authorship, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have theorized that authorship has traditionally aroused deep anxiety in women of our culture, because our "fundamental definitions of literary authority are . . . overtly and covertly patriarchal."¹ Chief among the cultural paradigms that have hampered female creativity, according to Gilbert and Gubar, are the "extreme images of 'angel' and 'monster' which male authors have generated" of women. The image of the angel has inculcated an ideal of self-renunciation incompatible with authorship—an ideal most perfectly realized in death, whether as martyred saint or as static objet d'art. Equally pernicious, the image of the monster has served to frighten women away from authorship by representing its very essence—plotting, scheming, manipulating—as loathsome and deadly in women. Thus in order to define themselves as authors, women have had to engage in a "revisionary struggle" against these cultural paradigms—a process which has often entailed rewriting the texts of their male precursors and retelling, from a female point of view, the cautionary stories that men have told about women.

Though not discussed by Gilbert and Gubar, the literary relationship between Edith Wharton and Henry James provides a fascinating illustration of their thesis. James was more than a precursor for Wharton; he was a mentor, and one who took a notoriously authoritative stand on matters of narrative technique and proper choice of subject.² Early in her career, Wharton had begun sending him samples of her fiction. When the master had responded by patronizingly indicating his desire to "pump the pure essence of my wisdom and experience" into this "almost too susceptible élève", Wharton had been both gratified and nettled.³ James's criticism of one story had devastated her. Significantly, she had assuaged her wounded pride by "composing a little parody of James's current style of writing"—significantly because parody, as Gilbert and Gubar point out, is "one of the key strategies" to which women writers have resorted in their "quest for self-definition."⁴ Even more revealing is Wharton's reaction to James's comments on her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). While she was sufficiently flattered by his praise to send copies of his letter to three close friends, and while she took the advice he proceeded "earnestly, tenderly, intelligently" to give her—"Profit, be warned, by my awful example of exile and ignorance. . . . Do New York! The lst-hand account is precious"—she privately disparaged the master's own latest creation. "Don't ask me what I think of The Wings of the Dove!" she grumbled to one of the very correspondents with whom she shared James's accolade.⁵

It is no accident that Wharton picked The Wings of the Dove as the terrain of her "revisionary struggle" against the master; for it contains nearly all the elements of the patriarchal mythology that Gilbert and Gubar have found so destructive to literary women. To begin with, the novel projects a dualistic image of womanhood, with Kate Croy representing the scheming, plotting "monsterwoman . . . [who] embodies intransigent female autonomy" and Milly Theale representing the "angelic sister" whom the monster-woman "threaten[s] to replace."⁶ Kate literally seeks to achieve her autonomy by stepping into the dying Milly's place as heiress to a vast fortune. In this way, she hopes to author her own script—one that would permit her to marry her lover, Merton Densher, a man of modest means, and still have the wherewithal to live in comfort and succor her needy father and sister. Otherwise, she would have to choose between the equally undesirable scripts her lover and family have authored for her, which oblige her either to marry for love and abandon her family, or to marry for money and abandon her lover. Far from endorsing Kate's script, however, the novel condemns it as monstrous, because it calls for Densher's marrying Milly on her deathbed, so that he and Kate can inherit her money.

By implication, The Wings of the Dove thus suggests that authorship itself is monstrous in women. Bearing out such a reading is the novel's denigration of its other female plotters. The chief author of the family script dictating a marriage of convenience, for example, is Kate's wealthy aunt and principal source of economic support, Maud Lowder, who vies with her niece in sinister manipulativeness. Mrs. Lowder frankly regards her niece as a marketable commodity which she has been "letting as you say of investments, appreciate," and which she intends to exchange only for entrée into the English aristocracy, by marrying Kate off to a Lord.⁷ Kate's widowed sister, Marian Condrip, who, along with their bankrupt father, supports Mrs. Lowder's plan, has herself proved inept at plotting. Having married a portionless clergyman and been left with four small children to provide for, she stands as a "grave example" of what an impractical match "might make of a woman," even while she pitilessly urges on Kate the "duty" of marrying well for her family's sake (WD, I, 37, 42).

The strongest evidence for discerning in The Wings of the Dove a patriarchal attack on female authorship is its satiric portrayal of a literal female author, the New England local colorist Susan Shepherd Stringham. At the outset, Mrs. Stringham appears merely parasitical and silly. In quest of grist for a romantic novel, she attaches herself to Milly Theale, whom she recognizes with an excitement that "positively [makes] her hand a while tremble too much for the pen," as "the real thing, the romantic life itself (WD, I, 107). Later, however, she, too, discloses the lineaments of patriarchal mythology's predatory monster-woman: when she confesses an inclination to "put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with her," Kate wonders apprehensively whether the redoubtable "Susie" intends to "Chop me up fine or serve me whole" (WD, II, 46). Whether as a comic or as a sinister figure, in sum, Mrs. Stringham personifies the freakishness of female authorship.

Not only does The Wings of the Dove perpetuate the traditional stereotypes so inimical to female authorship; it also vindicates the male right to pronounce judgment on women, and hence, by extension, to assume sole authorship of their stories. Except in the opening chapters of the book, we see Kate Croy almost entirely through the eyes of Merton Densher. As a journalist, Densher obviously incarnates the profession of authorship. He also incarnates the life of the mind, to which, as Kate perceives to her "lasting honour," she can have access only with "some such aid as his" (WD, I, 50-51). It follows that whatever weaknesses of character Densher displays in passively lending himself to Kate's designs against Milly, his judgment is never at issue. And where Kate is concerned, that judgment is increasingly negative. At first Densher judges Kate primarily in relation to himself.

Because he, unlike her, has never actively lied to Milly—if he had, he emphasizes, he would have "chucked" Kate to make his lie a truth—he feels morally superior to her (WD, II, 199, 326). Ultimately, however, Densher judges Kate in relation to Milly, whose angelic image interposes itself between the lovers after she has forgiven Densher on the eve of her death. In two climactic scenes at the end of the novel, Densher invokes Milly's ghost against Kate, first by giving her Milly's unopened Christmas letter, then by sending her the sealed announcement of Milly's bequest to him. When Kate casts the unopened letter into the fire, but breaks the seal of the bequest announcement, thus failing the moral tests Densher has devised for her, he confronts her with a final choice: either to renounce him, in exchange for the legacy, or to forego the legacy as the price of marrying him. With this ultimatum, delivered at the very moment Kate's plot comes to fruition, Densher wrests from her the power of authorship and reduces her once more to a character in a male author's script. In accordance with patriarchal tradition, Densher's—and James's—script now completes the moral repudiation of the monster-woman who chooses autonomy over love, by enshrining the dead angel-woman in her place.

Such, then, are the features marking The Wings of the Dove as what Gilbert and Gubar would call patriarchal myth. Since, as they contend, women writers attempting to struggle free from myths so deadly to their creativity inevitably had to reexamine the society that had produced them, it is not surprising that the main flaw Edith Wharton cited in The Wings of the Dove was its abstract moral treatment of a quintessentially social problem, its failure to illuminate the economic and cultural conditions limiting a woman's freedom and influencing or dictating her choices. "The characters in The Wings of the Dove' . . . seem isolated in a Crookes tube for our inspection," she complained in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, written after James's death.⁸ Privately she went much further. Greeting with enthusiasm the harsh critique of James's recent fiction published by her friend William Brownell in 1905, Wharton confided that it expressed her views "so exactly" that she felt as if it had been "celestially written" for her.⁹ Among the passages she singled out for special praise was one reproaching James for showing so little "knowledge of and interest in the sociology of the human species" that the world of his late novels was "a little like Lilliput without Gulliver."¹⁰

Wharton would have had very personal reasons for feeling that the stricture applied especially well to The Wings of the Dove; for the social situation James had presented so abstractly in that novel was one with which she was intimately acquainted. Not that Wharton had ever faced the necessity of marrying for money—her family, unlike Kate Croy's, was extremely wealthy. She had, however, experienced the social pressures defining marriage as the primary goal of a woman's existence and setting personal happiness, fulfillment, and intellectual compatibility below considerations of status, economic security, and family convenience in determining what was a suitable match. Even more to the point, she had had much exposure to the masculine type Merton Densher epitomized—a type whose pursuit of a feminine ideal too rarefied for any earthly woman to live up to actually masked a deepseated fear of marriage, as Wharton would show in The House of Mirth.¹¹

Several factors thus combined to spur Wharton into undertaking a female revision of her mentor's patriarchal fable: the sympathetic insight her own life had given her into the plight of a woman caught, like Kate Croy, between the economic dependency patriarchal society imposed on women and the unattainable ideal of transcendency it held up to them; the need she felt, as James's disciple, to declare her independence of him and to prove herself more than the master's "echo";¹² and finally, the special burden she shared with other women writers, of overturning a literary model that denied women the power of authorship.

In order to reclaim Kate Croy's story for female authorship, Wharton had to translate what was essentially a cautionary tale—how the wicked witch earns her discomfiture at the hands of the prince when she attempts to step into the shoes of the fairytale princess—into an inside view of woman's entrapment in patriarchal society. This entailed a number of fundamental changes: (1) replacing the "Crookes tube" in which Kate Croy, Milly Theale, and Merton Densher "seem isolated" with a fully delineated social world, governed by behavioral codes and value systems that rigidly circumscribe its inhabitants' freedom; (2) fusing the split images of woman as monster and angel, fallen temptress and innocent martyr, into a single figure whose aspirations and limitations derive from social causes; (3) presenting this woman's experiences of entrapment and asphyxiation primarily through her own consciousness, rather than through that of a male observer-author; (4) exposing the male observer-author's judgments as obtuse and self-serving; (5) providing glimpses of alternative roles and relationships for women that point the way toward an eventual solution of their predicament in patriarchal society.

Let us begin with Wharton's first major departure from patriarchal script in The House of Mirth—her sociological reformulation of the moral choice its heroine confronts. Lily Bart, like Kate Croy, has been thrown by her father's bankruptcy and her mother's death on the mercy of a rich aunt who has engaged to support her until she can make a "good marriage," and who, in the meantime, fosters in her niece "a salutary sense of dependence."¹³ Like Kate, Lily is also torn between a marriage that would offer her wealth and social prestige and one that would offer her love, intellectual communion, and spiritual growth. Wharton's focus, however, is not on which Lily will choose or how she will attempt to reconcile the two—the problems that preoccupy James in The Wings of the Dove—but on what has made wealth and social prestige so vital to Lily and so impossible to obtain except through marriage—questions about Kate that James does not address. In raising this issue, Wharton's aim is to explore the factors that restrict women like Lily to dependent roles and condition them to regard themselves as "beautiful object[s]" destined for male consumption.¹⁴

From the start, Wharton characterizes Lily as "so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate" (HM, p. 7). The arresting simile betrays Wharton's rootedness in a female literary tradition that Gilbert and Gubar have found pervaded by images of imprisonment. Wharton uses many such images to suggest Lily's imprisonment in The House of Mirth: the succession of houses from which she flees, the various "ladylike . . . costumes" for which she mortgages her reputation, the mirrors in which she constantly peers, and the paintings on which she models her appearance in one of the novel's most memorable scenes.¹⁵

The task Wharton sets herself is to explain how the civilization that produced Lily fashioned her into the exquisitely specialized, yet fragile and non-functional object she is. The first explanation Wharton advances is biographical: Lily's mother has brought her up to be "ornamental," to crave luxury and despise "dinginess," and to prize her beauty, especially after her father's bankruptcy, as "the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt," the means of purchasing the luxury that enhances and is enhanced by her beauty (HM, pp. 34, 297). In other words, as a female custodian of patriarchal values, Lily's mother has instilled in her two potentially conflicting lessons: that she must seek to embody the aesthetic equivalent of that deadly moral ideal, the angel, by turning herself into an object d'art; and that she must cultivate the skills needed to market herself to the right male buyer. Ironically, however, those skills—plotting, scheming, manipulating—are precisely the ones patriarchal society discourages in women. Unable to resolve the contradiction, Lily never succeeds in authoring her own life, even along the lines of patriarchal script.

The biographical explanation Wharton offers of Lily's fate becomes a sociological explanation when applied to the other women of her set, all of whom have been taught to trade in their charms and to rely for their support on wealthy husbands. The most obvious examples are Bertha Dorset, who acts as Lily's nemesis, and the divorcée Carry Fisher, whose tutelage Lily half-heartedly follows. Bertha feeds her self-esteem by engaging in extramarital affairs, while taking care not to furnish her disgruntled husband with the evidence of infidelity that he needs to divorce her. Carry maintains herself between marriages by sponging off her friends' husbands and grooming rich parvenus to enter Old New York's inner circle, at the same time keeping an eagle eye out for eligible men. The fate of those women who have no charms to trade in merely reinforces the lesson. Lily's dour spinster cousin Grace Stepney, for instance, is relegated to the obscurity of a drab boarding house, excluded from dinner parties, and dependent on their Aunt Peniston's charity until she inherits Aunt Peniston's fortune in Lily's stead. And Lily's childhood friend Gerty Farish, likewise a spinster, "has a horrid little place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat" (HM, p. 7). True, Gerty's commitment to social work infuses more meaning into her "dingy" life than Lily can appreciate; nonetheless, Gerty remains pathetically conscious of her inability to compete with Lily for the love of Lawrence Seiden: "What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness? A dull face invited a dull fate" (HM, p. 162). Throughout the novel, Wharton uses these other women as doubles mirroring Lily's predicament. Once again, it is a strategy linking Wharton with her nineteenth-century female precursors, who often projected their own self-divisions onto characters functioning as doubles for the heroine.¹⁶

When Wharton explains Lily's dilemma in sociological terms, she does not confine herself to dramatizing the impact of patriarchal values on upper-class women. By taking Lily out of her narrow upperclass milieu and sending her on a downward spiral through New York society, Wharton shows us that the same pernicious cultural assumptions trammel women of every class. Nowhere in The House of Mirth do we meet women who do not depend on men for their self-esteem, their economic security, or both. This is true even of the working women among whom Lily ends her career after her disinheritance. Netty Struthers is fairly representative. She ascribes her will to begin life over again, following her abandonment by a lover, to her husband George, who "cared for me enough to have me as I was," and she explicitly discounts the thought of an independent life: "I'd never have had the heart to go on working just for myself (HM, pp. 314-15).

Wharton's attempt to depict the working-class world, which she did not know at first hand the way she did New York high society, has been criticized as an artistic lapse.¹⁷ But the glimpse Wharton gives us of working women's lives is indispensable for putting Lily's tragedy into perspective and for generalizing it into a statement about woman's fate in patriarchal society. Indeed one might argue that the absence of such a perspective in The Wings of the Dove, where the aesthetic shudder aroused by Marian Condrip's "lumpishly" furnished suburban flat provides our only sense of what Kate's life would be like without wealth, is a far more serious flaw of artistry (WD, I, 36-37; II, 364-65).

Lily's fall into the working class allows Wharton both to expose her heroine's limitations in the strongest possible light and to gauge the extent to which they are shared by women of other classes. The main limitations Lily displays as she comes into contact with working women are her complete insensitivity to their plight and her inability to adapt to their condition. Hitherto, comments Wharton acerbically, Lily has "accepted with philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on foundations of obscure humanity"; the wintry "mud and sleet" lying outside her "hot-house" world have no more disturbed her than they would an "orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere" (HM, p. 150). Only when herself subjected to the "sedentary toil" in unwholesome air that has given her sister milliners in Mme. Regina's hat shop their "fagged profiles," "sallow" complexions, and uniform look of "dull and colourless" middle age does Lily acknowledge her kinship with them (HM, p. 282). Even then, she fondly hopes at first to establish her superiority "by a special deftness of touch." Instead, she finds herself "an object of criticism and amusement to the other work-women" because after two months of apprenticeship, "her untutored fingers [are] still blundering over the rudiments of the trade" (HM, pp. 284-85). Lily is forced in the end to recognize that she has "neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a worker among workers"—that unlike these women she has always dismissed, she cannot earn her own living (HM, p. 301).

While contrasting Lily unfavorably with working-class women in this respect, Wharton exhibits their world as but a "fragmentary and distorted image" of Lily's. They, too, she charges, are "awed only by success—by the gross tangible image of material achievement" that determines a woman's rank in society (HM, pp. 285-86). They, too, as Netty Struthers indicates, consider marriage the ultimate criterion of "success" for a woman. Thus from the highest to the lowest levels of patriarchal society, Wharton shows women unquestioningly accepting the system that locks them into economic and psychological dependency. Hardly able to conceive of developing a sense of worth outside marriage, much less of seeking autonomy, such women patently belie the patriarchal stereotype of female plotting run amok.

In sum, the sociological dimension Wharton has added to her version of Kate Croy's story has fundamentally altered its meaning. By presenting Lily Bart as the victim of social constraints that operate against all women, whatever their class, Wharton makes it impossible for readers to see in her the conniving monster James would have them see in Kate.

Wharton's Lily is more than a humanized avatar of James's Kate, however. After all, Kate describes herself as "a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like" (WD, II, 226), whereas Lily repeatedly recoils at the crucial moment from the subterfuge and self-prostitution necessary to land a wealthy husband. Lily's moral fastidiousness and the vulnerability that results from it, manifested most nakedly in her death from an overdose of sleeping potion, identify her not with the monsterwoman, but with her martyred "angelic sister." Lily is thus Kate Croy and Milly Theale rolled into one flawed, suffering being, who enacts within herself the Manichaean struggle that patriarchal mythology projects outward onto the icons of monster and angel. By fusing these sundered icons, Wharton has symbolically indicated the means of restoring woman to wholeness. That process, she implies, must begin with woman's rejection of the double bind in which patriarchy traps her when it forces her to choose between submitting to the angel's lingering death and courting the monster's punishment.

Restoring woman to wholeness also entails granting her experiences of entrapment and asphyxiation in patriarchal society a significance independent of the one a male observer would discern. That is, it entails restoring to woman the right of authorship which the male observer has usurped from her. We have already seen how Merton Densher usurps Kate's right of authorship. Less obviously, he also usurps Milly's by translating her death into a moral and aesthetic drama staged for his benefit. In contrast, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff has brilliantly demonstrated, Wharton's treatment of Lily's slow decline and death compels us to "revaluate" the tradition of rendering the "death of a beautiful woman . . . through the eyes of . . . a highly sensitized, loverlike man."¹⁸ Except in the opening and closing scenes of The House of Mirth, Wharton turns this patriarchal tradition on its head: entering the consciousness of the woman "thus exalted and objectified" (to quote Wolff again), she "reveal[s] the psychological distortions, the self-alienation, that a woman suffers when she accepts the status of idealized object." In those opening and closing scenes, however, Wharton limits the reader to the traditional male viewpoint, presenting Lily as her would-be lover Lawrence Seiden sees her. The gap between his perceptions and those Wharton allows us through a direct view of Lily makes for a devastating indictment of the male observer-author's myopia and sanctimoniousness.

Nowhere does the opposition between James's male vision and Wharton's female revision emerge more starkly than in her recreation of Merton Densher as Lawrence Seiden. Wharton mercilessly accentuates in Seiden the traits James obfuscates in Densher: his fear of marriage, which the moral perfection he exacts of women and the unacceptable conditions he poses for marriage serve to cover up; his dishonesty with regard to "material things," which he looks down on women for accounting so vital, while himself clinging to the skirts of the wealthy; and his self-righteous cruelty, which he passes off as love.

Seiden himself hints at his fear of marriage in the very first chapter. When Lily reproaches him for not coming to see her more often though they "get on so well," he answers "promptly": "Perhaps that's the reason" (HM, p. 8). His frankness here is unusual. More typically, he tries to blame his own irresolution on Lily. That way he enjoys the luxury of denigrating her values, without the risk of inviting her to share his "republic of the spirit" (HM, 68, 72-73). True, Lily continues to angle after wealthy suitors, despite her attraction to Seiden. Yet Seiden seizes all too eagerly on every pretext she offers him for disengaging himself.

The most striking instance occurs, significantly, on the heels of a scene reverberating with echoes from The Wings of the Dove.¹⁹ In the Brys' evening of tableaux vivants, Wharton boldly restages the famous dinner party in Venice, evocative of a Veronese painting, at which Milly makes her valedictory appearance. The Brys' "Venetian ceiling" is reportedly by Veronese, and among the tableaux they recreate is a "Veronese supper" (HM, pp. 132, 134). Although Lily's model is a Reynolds portrait, rather than a Veronese banquet scene, her graceful white robe recalls the "wonderful white dress" donned by Milly for her gala occasion (HM, p. 137; WD, II, 213). Lily's ethereal beauty inspires in Seiden a combination of the sexual passion that draws Densher to Kate and the worship of a feminine ideal that draws him to Milly. This time, Seiden determines to marry Lily and take her "beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul" which characterize her life in New York high society (HM, p. 154). He even recognizes that if he is to rescue Lily, he must not expect to free her from her old life overnight ("Perseus's task," he reminds himself, "is not done when he has loosed Andromeda's chains, for her limbs are numb with bondage"); nor must he allow "his own view of her . . . to be coloured" by the vulgar minds in which he sees her reflected (HM, pp. 158-59). Still, these insights do not prevent him from once again abandoning Lily and casting the blame on her, when he sees her emerging from Gus Trenor's house around midnight. Selden's haste in crediting "appearances" and rumors that impugn Lily's purity stands in signal contrast to the unwavering faith that a less refined suitor, the Jewish parvenu Simon Rosedale, maintains in her.

Belying the moral fastidiousness Seiden displays toward Lily, moreover, is his own previous indulgence in an extramarital affair with Bertha Dorset, the loosest and most cynical woman in Lily's circle. Clearly, the double standard Seiden applies to Lily serves as a defense against commitment to her—a defense he does not need against a married woman, which is precisely what constitutes Bertha's appeal.

Wharton shrewdly analyzes Selden's fear of marriage. "It had been Selden's fate," she explains, "to have a charming mother. . . . Unfortunately .. . his views of womankind in especial were tinged by the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of 'values'" (HM, p. 152). Seiden, in other words, has an oedipal fixation on his mother, and this fixation lies at the root of his deep ambivalence toward women, expressed in the very ideal he pursues: "a pretty woman" blending in character "the stoic's carelessness of material things" and "the Epicurean's pleasure in them" (HM, p. 152).

Ambivalence is the keynote, not only of Selden's relations with women, but of his relations with the social world he professes to despise—quite properly, since the two are intertwined in the "values" he has imbibed from his mother. "You spend a good deal of your time in the element you disapprove of," Lily observes in response to his assertion that his ideal, unlike hers, is "personal freedom"—freedom "from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents" (HM, pp. 68, 70). Lily herself embodies the attraction which "material things" hold for him, notwithstanding his desire to transcend them; for Wharton makes amply clear that Seiden views Lily primarily as an exquisite objet d'art which "must have cost a great deal to make" (HM, p. 5).²⁰ She also emphasizes how much it costs to maintain the kind of beauty Seiden so admires in Lily—a beauty dependent, like that of an objet d'art, on being displayed in a tasteful setting and enhanced by objects of equal value (in Lily's case expensive clothes and jewels). Just as a museum piece would lose its effect in a cheap storefront, so Lily would lose her charm in dingy surroundings and "dowdy clothes," and under the load of cares that go with them; she would look indistinguishable from the "shallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and [the] flatchested women struggling with paper bundles and palmleaf fans," who strike Seiden, when he contrasts them to her, as belonging to a different race (HM, pp. 5, 73). Thus even were Seiden psychologically capable of marriage, he would soon tire of the Lily his modest means would support. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff puts it, "Lily unadorned would, after all, fail to sustain his interest."²¹ But of course he can no more admit this to himself than he can acknowledge his fear of marriage.

It is in the final scenes of The House of Mirth that Wharton most completely discredits her version of James's hero. James, though making Densher partially responsible for Milly's death, had allowed him the absolution denied Kate. Wharton, on the contrary, exposes Seiden as sanctimonious and self-serving to the last. The moment of truth she seems to grant Seiden when he confronts Lily's death is ironically short-lived. Hardly does he come to "a realization of the cowardice which had driven him from [Lily] at the very moment of attainment" than he proceeds to justify himself at Lily's expense: "He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. But at least he had loved her—had been willing to stake his future on his faith in her" (HM, pp. 328-29).

Unlike James, Wharton does not let her "negative hero"²² get away with this self-righteous reaffirmation of moral superiority to the woman he claims to have loved. Instead, she once again shows how little faith Seiden has in Lily and how easily it is shaken. Once again, Lily's mysterious entanglement with Gus Trenor affords the pretext for annulling the "personal stake" Seiden feels in her affairs as a result of "their last hour together" (HM, p. 327). Among Lily's papers, Seiden finds an unsealed envelope addressed to Trenor. Too chivalrous to open it, he "put[s] it from him with sudden loathing," only to discover in the course of examining Lily's checkbook that all the envelope contains is a check discharging Lily's debt to Trenor with nearly the full amount of her aunt's $10,000 legacy. The reference to Selden's and Lily's "last hour together" conceals another barbed irony; for it reminds us that Seiden has "hardly noticed" the most significant occurrence of that hour—Lily's heroic gesture of casting into the fire the incriminating letters between him and Bertha Dorset which she could have used to purchase her social reinstatement (HM, p. 310).

The reversal Wharton has effected here of the twin scenes climaxing The Wings of the Dove is unmistakable:

Kate's brutal act of tossing Milly's letter into the fire has become both Lily's generous act of self-sacrifice and Selden's obtuse disregard of it; Densher's noble renunciation of Milly's legacy has become Lily's far nobler renunciation of her aunt's legacy; Densher's veneration of Milly's sacred tribute has become Selden's base suspicion of Lily. In rewriting the ending of The Wings of the Dove to exonerate Kate-Lily and condemn Densher-Selden, Wharton is repudiating once and for all the right of moral judgment claimed by the male observer-author, insisting once and for all on the female author's right to tell woman's own story from her own point of view.

Although that story, as Wharton tells it, centers on the victimization of women in patriarchal society, it also offers hints of how women may escape their crippling psychological and economic dependency. One such hint is embodied in Gerty Farish's career as a social worker and in Lily's dream of using her aunt's legacy to set herself up as a milliner like Mme. Regina. Granted, neither of these options proves feasible for Lily. Nevertheless, Wharton seems to be suggesting that the availability of satisfying and remunerative careers is a prerequisite for ending women's dependency. The other prerequisite she indicates seems more nearly attainable in The House of Mirth: sisterhood. Counterbalancing the women who betray or exploit Lily, like Judy Trenor, Bertha Dorset, Mrs. Peniston, and Grace Stepney, are women who try to help her, either by finding her alternative means of livelihood, as do Carry Fisher and Gerty Farish, or by commiserating with her, as do the working women Miss Kilroy and Netty Struthers. These gestures of sisterhood, while they do not succeed in saving Lily, point toward the creation of a feminine support network that promises to facilitate women's achievement of independence. The significance of such implied resolutions to the feminine predicament Lily exemplifies becomes all the more apparent when we realize that Wharton offers them in lieu of the resolution to which James brings The Wings of the Dove: the redemption of the male observer, effected when the angel-woman's sacrificial death arms him against the monster-woman's blandishments.

As a case study of the female author's problematic relationship with her male mentor, Wharton's prolonged dialogue with James presents an especially intriguing confirmation of Gilbert's and Gubar's hypothesis, because the two authors' comments on each other's work permit critics to spy not only on the female chafing under her yoke, but on the male squirming over his bed of coals. That James sensed the revisionary spirit of The House of Mirth is obvious from his discomfort with the novel. Whereas critics have unanimously ranked it among Wharton's finest works, James ranked it below a far inferior novel, which he himself criticized for its "strangely infirm composition and construction." Even more telling is the main fault he found with The House of Mirth: that Lawrence Seiden, who ought to have been the novel's center of consciousness, was "too absent."^23, Wharton's shaft had hit home.

For her part, Wharton continued the process of revision. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff has shown, Wharton's The Age of Innocence revises James's The Portrait of a Lady in much the same way that The House of Mirth does The Wings of the Dove.²⁴ And in her autobiography, Wharton similarly characterizes her novel The Custom of the Country as an attempt to incorporate James's favorite theme, the encounter of American and European, into a broader social chronicle.²⁵

Wharton saved her boldest challenge to male literary authority for posthumous publication, however. The Beatrice Palmato manuscript, which she left in embryo among her private papers, may be the first explicit account of female sexual arousal written by a woman. As R.W.B. Lewis has pointed out, it startlingly revises both the strait-laced, ladylike image of Wharton that male critics like Percy Lubbock helped transmit to posterity and the phallocentric descriptions of female sexual response that male authors like Lawrence and Joyce were introducing to Wharton's contemporaries.²⁶ Yet Wharton must have realized that the time was not ripe for a woman to flout taboos which men were only beginning to violate. The Beatrice Palmato fragment remained a private record, and Wharton bequeathed to a new generation of female revisionists the task of reclaiming woman's right to author—and publish—the text of her own erotic experience.

¹ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 17, 25, 28-30, 34, 45-49.

² On James's "rigid" literary views, see Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1933; rpt. New York: Scribner's, 1964), pp. 180-83, 234. Also James himself, cited in Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (New York: George Braziller, 1965), p. 247: "if a work of . . . fiction, interests me at all (and very few, alas, do!) I always want to write it over in my own way. . . . "

³ Bell, 246-47; R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 126, 131: Leon Edel, The Master: 1901-1916, Vol: V of Henry James (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 202.

⁴ Lewis, Edith Wharton, p. 125; Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 76, 80.

⁵ Lewis, Edith Wharton, p. 127; Bell, pp. 76-77. 222. Wharton had in fact anticipated James's advice to "Do New York" in a novel she subsequently abandoned to write The House of Mirth.

⁶ Gilbert and Gubar, p. 28.

⁷ Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Scribner's, 1909), I, 82. All further page references will be to this edition of The Wings of the Dove and will be given parenthetically in the text, keyed to the abbreviation WD.

⁸ Wharton, Backward Glance, p. 190.

⁹ Bell, p. 222.

¹⁰ William C. Brownell, American Prose Masters, ed. Howard Mumford Jones (1909; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 263. The essay was originally published in Atlantic Monthly, 95 (April, 1905), 496-519. The quotation refers specifically to The Awkward Age, but it is clear from the context that Brownell considers that novel typical of James's late fiction.

¹¹ Bell, p. 241, points out that "Wharton was herself a victim of the compulsion to 'make a good marriage.'" For biographical details on the men in Wharton's life, see Lewis, Edith Wharton, pp. 37-51; also Wharton, A Backward Glance, p. 95.

¹² "The continued cry that I am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last ten years I can't read, much as I delight in the man) . . . makes me feel rather hopeless." Cited in Bell, p. 221.

¹³ Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905; rpt. New York: Scribner's, 1969), p. 38. All further page references will be to this easily accessible edition and will be given parenthetically in the text, keyed to the abbreviation HM.

¹⁴ See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 110-33, for an extremely illuminating discussion of Lily as an objet d'art.

¹⁵ Gilbert and Gubar, p. 85, discuss the use of these symbols in nineteenth-century literature by women.

¹⁶ Gilbert and Gubar, p. 78.

¹⁷ See Diana Trilling, "The House of Mirth Revisited," in Irving Howe, ed., Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 107. Also in Howe, ed., see Alfred Kazin, "Edith Wharton," pp. 92-93 for a sweeping assertion of Wharton's alleged ignorance of "how the poor lived."

¹⁸ Wolff, p. 132.

¹⁹ R.W.B. Lewis, Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), p. 136, has also noted these echoes.

²⁰ I am indebted here to Wolff, pp. 120-24.

²¹ Wolff, p. 121.

²² The epithet Wharton applied to Seiden in a letter to a friend, cited in Lewis, Edith Wharton, p. 155.

²³ James's comments are cited in Bell, p. 259, and Lewis, Edith Wharton, pp. 153, 180-181.

²⁴ Wolff, pp. 310-13.

²⁵ Wharton, A Backward Glance, pp. 182-83.

²⁶ Lewis, Edith Wharton, p. 525; see also his Appendix C, pp. 545-48, for the outline and text of the Beatrice Palmato fragment.