The House of Mirth (2 page)

It is no wonder that this feeling of not being able to breathe, of yearning for fresh air in the drawing rooms of the privileged class, is what she evokes so well in her best work. (Wharton's best-known work is, ironically, her least successful; she does not really understand the country folk of
Ethan Frome
, and so she draws them two-dimensionally, which may explain why their story is so ritualistically assigned to adolescents in school.) And it is no wonder that the weakest characters in the novels are male, that even the best of them are well-intentioned, well-educated, weak men who know what ought to be done, but cannot seem to muster the fortitude to do it.

There are no true villains in
The House of Mirth
, which is the way it should be when a novel's theme is character versus society. It is tempting to blame the slippery slope of Lily's brief life on the society grande dames, those unconscious monsters who enforce the social code through dinner invitations and testamentary bequests. Yet, even they seem to be the victims of a great inexorable inertia, comprised of custom, fashion, morality, and ignorance, and we see them bested by the shifting shape of society, in which vice can be overlooked if it is handled politely, and new money can be accepted if there is only enough of it.

Nor can we hate the straw man set up so conspicuously for our dislike at the beginning of
The House of Mirth
, the smarmy social climber Sim Rosedale, despite his creator's clear disdain, her insistence on identifying him as a Jew whenever he appears. He is, after all, the one person who appears to approach Lily with candor and honesty, even when he withdraws his proposal of marriage in the face of her increasingly irregular social status. His last words to her, when he meets her in the street, Lily fallen by then to life in a rooming house, a failed career trimming the hats of the women who were once her friends, are perhaps the most touching in the book. “If you'd only let me, I'd set you up over them all,” he says. “I'd put you where you could wipe your feet on 'em!”

It is easier, finally, to dislike and blame Lawrence Selden, who like the other good and wise professional men of Wharton's work can see beyond the gauzy scrim of social convention, but finally cannot muster the courage to tear it aside. (We will meet such men again in Wharton's work, in Ralph Marvell in
The Custom of the Country
and Newland Archer in
The Age of Innocence
.) It is Selden who reinforces Lily's disdain for the arid courtesies and compromises of their social milieu, but who offers her no alternatives, who mocks the monetary underpinnings of all their undertakings, yet cannot marry her because he cannot afford to keep her in the style she longs for. “Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me if you have nothing to give me instead?” she asks him, a
cri de coeur
to which he cannot respond. Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the novel is his, as he kneels at her bedside in the boarding house and contemplates “the ruin of their lives,” with his still left to live alone.

But if there are no stock villains in the novel, its heroine is unmistakably the mesmerizing Lily Bart. She is largely the agent of her own fall because she cannot bear the bargains she must make to triumph. Yet, to the end, she laughs at herself. When her aunt disinherits her, she refuses to weep, despite the fact that she now has nothing to live on and nowhere to go: “I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.” And to the end she recognizes right and tries to do it. She refuses to testify to the adultery of Bertha Dorset, who has ruined her, although it will likely restore her reputation. She leaves the establishment of a woman with a checkered past and underhanded marriage plans when she recognizes the plot to seduce a witless young heir. And she does each of these things quietly, and just a bit too late to do herself any good. Tell the truth, one of her friends says, and all will be restored. With a bitter laugh, Lily replies, “the truth about any girl is that once she's talked about she's done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.” Lily's sense of honor is a rebuke to her social stratum, in which the smoking of a cigarette can be a scandal, depending on where it is done, who sees it, and the sex and marital state of the smoker.

The literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote that
The House of Mirth
was Wharton's “finest achievement because money is the subject.” And Wharton's literary fortunes, in the years since
The House of Mirth
made her reputation, have indeed tended to rise and fall depending on American prosperity and the national tolerance for those who know the difference between a dessert and a salad fork, sterling and plate.

But if money were the true subject of
The House of Mirth
, the book would be occasionally admired, sometimes studied, but largely forgotten. Instead, it is utterly contemporary in its essential theme, the conflict between what we wish to be and what society insists we become, between our ideals and our comfort. “What she craved,” the author says finally of Lily Bart, “and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.” This is the tragedy of Lily and Selden, their society and our society, too.

—Anna Quindlen
July 1999

S
elden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.

It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country, but what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him. There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.

An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of putting her skill to the test.

“Mr. Selden—what good luck!”

She came forward smiling, eager, almost, in her resolve to intercept him. One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train.

Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?

“What luck!” she repeated. “How nice of you to come to my rescue!”

He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take.

“Oh, almost any—even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One sits out a cotillion—why not sit out a train? It isn't a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh's conservatory—and some of the women are not a bit uglier.”

She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors' at Bellomont, and had missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck.

“And there isn't another till half-past five.” She consulted the little jewelled watch among her laces. “Just two hours to wait. And I don't know what to do with myself. My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to Bellomont at one o'clock, and my aunt's house is closed, and I don't know a soul in town.” She glanced plaintively about the station. “It
is
hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh's, after all. If you can spare the time, do take me somewhere for a breath of air.”

He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck him as diverting. As a spectator he had always enjoyed Lily Bart, and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.

“Shall we go over to Sherry's for a cup of tea?” She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.

“So many people come up to town on a Monday—one is sure to meet a lot of bores. I'm as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not to make any difference; but if
I'm
old enough, you're not,” she objected gaily. “I'm dying for tea—but isn't there a quieter place?”

He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly. Her discretions interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure that both were part of the same carefully elaborated plan. In judging Miss Bart he had always made use of the “argument from design.”

“The resources of New York are rather meagre,” he said; “but I'll find a hansom first, and then we'll invent something.”

He led her through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past sallow-faced girls in preposterous hats and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was.

A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly over the moist street.

“How delicious! Let us walk a little,” she said as they emerged from the station.

They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she moved beside him, with her long, light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external, as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?

As he reached this point in his speculations, the sun came out, and her lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she paused with a sigh.

“Oh, dear, I'm so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York is!” She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. “Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirtsleeves.” Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. “Some one has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade.”

“I am glad my street meets with your approval,” said Selden as they turned the corner.

“Your street? Do you live here?”

She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes.

“Ah, yes—to be sure:
The Benedick
. What a nice-looking building! I don't think I've ever seen it before.” She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian façade. “Which are your windows? Those with the awnings down?”

“On the top floor—yes.”

“And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!”

He paused a moment. “Come up and see,” he suggested. “I can give you a cup of tea in no time—and you won't meet any bores.”

Her colour deepened—she still had the art of blushing at the right time—but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made.

“Why not? It's too tempting—I'll take the risk,” she declared.

“Oh, I'm not dangerous,” he said in the same key. In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of her consent.