The House of Mirth (53 page)

Blake Nevius, in his excellent
Edith Wharton,
suggests that
The House of Mirth
belongs with the novels of the period that explored the waste of human and spiritual resources that in America went hand in hand with the exploitation of the land and forests. I would use a stronger word than waste. It is deliberate destruction. What explains the continuing fascination of this novel is not the moral struggle but the drama of the hunt of a beautiful and desperate creature by a pack of remorseless hounds. The creature may double back in her tracks, she may bound over streams, and occasionally her pursuers may lose the scent, but so does she lose strength and speed, and the end is inevitable. Lily drops from the circle of the Trenors and Dorsets to that of the Brys and Sim Rosedale, from there to the vulgar world of the Gormers, thence to the demimonde of Norma Hatch, and finally to the milliner's establishment and the overdose of sleeping pills. She never has a chance.

For she is unarmed. She has no money in a world that cares for nothing else. Judy Trenor does not mind her husband's making love to Lily; it is only when he gives her money that she drops her. Bertha Dorset, similarly, hangs on to the fortune of a husband whom she despises at the cost of Lily's very life. And Lily's family, however critical of her behavior, will not turn their backs while there is a chance that she may inherit Mrs. Peniston's money. But as soon as they hear the will, they scuttle from her poverty as from a leper.

The story begins to take on some of the light of a melodrama as it reaches its climax in Monte Carlo, when Lily is expelled from the Dorsets' yacht. Of course, in afterthought it is incredible that supposed ladies and gentlemen should behave quite so despicably, that George Dorset should stand by so basely, that Jack Stepney should be so grudging, that nobody should raise a finger to help Lily except Selden, who takes her to a hotel in a cab. But as one reads it, it is altogether convincing. The hunted creature is at bay; it is the whole brute world against, not the principles of Lily Bart, or even the good taste of Lily Bart, but simply, in the last analysis, against the beauty of Lily Bart. Lily's beauty is the light in which each of her different groups would like to shine, but when they find that it illuminates their ugliness they want to put it out. It is a beauty, however, that is indestructible, even in poverty, even in death, a beauty that the Trenors and Dorsets, with all their taste and money and ingenuity, can never hope to duplicate, a beauty that is the haunting symbol of what society might be—and isn't.

Lily's physical appearance gives a centripetal pull to a story that might otherwise ramble. When we first see her, through Selden's eyes in Grand Central Station, she is beginning to lose her purity of tint after eleven years of late hours and dancing, yet anything about her is still “rigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine.” It strikes him that she must have cost a great deal to make, as if numbers of dull and ugly people had been sacrificed to produce her. Not until he sees her in her last great social triumph, as Reynolds' Mrs. Lloyd in a
tableau vivant
at the Brys', with poised foot and lifted arm, all “soaring grace,” is the full poetry of her loveliness revealed to him. Then he sees her as divested from the trivialities of her world and catching “a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was part.”

As adversity deepens, he notices a subtle change in her appearance. It has lost the transparency through which fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible and has fused into a hard, brilliant substance. Later, at the reading of Mrs. Peniston's disinheriting will, we see her “tall and noble in her black dress.” Rosedale meets her in the street, drooping with lassitude, and is struck by the way the dark penciling of fatigue under her eyes and the morbid, blue-veined pallor of her temples bring out the brightness of her hair and lips. He sees her beauty as a “forgotten enemy” that has lain in ambush to spring out on him unawares. And Selden, watching her for the last time kneeling on the hearthrug, will remember long afterward “how the red play of the flame sharpened the depression of her nostrils and intensified the blackness of the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes.” A few hours later he is to see her on her narrow bed, “with motionless hands and calm, unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart.”

Mrs. Wharton deprecated in her memoirs the tendency, not infrequent in novelists of manners, notably Balzac, Thackeray, and Proust, to be dazzled by contact with the very society they satirize, but she conceded that this seeming inconsistency might, in some, be “a deep necessity in the creator's imagination.” It was a tendency that she escaped herself, for she was certainly not dazzled by her New York fashionable world, but it may be a pity that her exemption was quite so complete. Society in
The House of Mirth
is a bit too harshly drawn. It cannot believe that some member of Lily's family would not have come forward to help her in the end or that she would not have found a man to love her instead of a prosey prig.

Poor Mr. Selden, it is not really his fault. He is a victim of the plot requirements. He has to keep stating to Lily the values of spiritual independence, and he can do so only where he can find her—in the social world. Consequently he strikes the reader as a man who cannot pass up a party, a sort of Ward McAllister posing as a Thoreau. The only way that Mrs. Wharton could have saved him would have been to represent him as a man who hated society and frequented it only to see Lily. But such a man might have won Lily away from it, so Selden must be made a tepid lover as well as a seeming hypocrite.

Fifteen years after the publication of
The House of Mirth,
when she had lived through the breakup of her marriage and a world war, Mrs. Wharton, then an expatriate, decided that she had underrated society, at least as it had existed in the New York of her own girlhood, that sober, placid brownstone town that had not yet been corrupted by the tide of new fortunes. Out of this sense of apology came
The Age of Innocence,
where Ellen Olenska, unlike Lily, has the courage to be independent and where Newland Archer, unlike Selden, is man enough to champion her cause. But Mrs. Wharton never softened about Lily Bart's New York. Indeed, her rancor sharpened as the years went by, and in book after book she struck at what she deemed to be its successors. Unfortunately, as she had moved abroad, she no longer saw it directly, and her shots went increasingly astray. But
The House of Mirth
is evidence of her deadly aim in 1905.

—Louis Auchincloss
New York City

Ethan Frome,
1911 (Signet Classic)

The Reef,
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912

The Custom of the Country,
New York: C. Scribner's sons, 1913

Summer,
1917 (Signet Classic)

The Age of Innocence,
1920 (Signet Classic)

The Glimpses of the Moon,
1922 (Signet Classic)

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New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1934

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