What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (30 page)

Desire is a strange brew, Wharton knew, concocted of the desires of others. Her psychological acumen suffuses
The House of Mirth
, in which Lily is “unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others.” Lily has “in her blood” the uses for which she was made but is unwilling to go to “the opposite extreme” and “discard things” because they are “old-fashioned.”

Once more the haunting sense of physical ugliness was intensified by her mental depression, so that each piece of the offending furniture seemed to thrust forth its most aggressive angle
. (I, 9, 86)

Lily does want to get rid of ugly things. The effects of physical ugliness—disproportion—and mental depression intermingle in her. Their symmetry or dissymmetry serves Wharton’s notion
of the interior as inextricable from the exterior. Lily’s internal conflicts are displayed in the outer world, where she is a beautiful but tormented trophy in its display case. Her inner struggles show themselves as much by what she does not do as by what she does.

It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the Ashman. If I could only do over my aunt’s drawing room I know I should be a better woman
. (I, 1, 8)

Lily’s longing to clean out her aunt’s room is a wish to change herself, to throw out her own horrors. In a better room, she might become better—setting and place affect character. But Lily can’t throw out the horrors, she cannot change the conditions in which she lives that have made her the kind of woman she is. When she strikes out against convention or her interests, by spending time with Selden and avoiding her rich, boring suitor, Percy Gryce, her revolt takes the shape of inaction, temporizing. She may want to remove horrors but she does not act or cannot. Cleaning her aunt’s room of horrors could also be another clever reference to the Gothic, but from the Gothic, which preceded Freud, with its insistence on the darkness in human beings and the cauldron of murky, unconscious desires that drive behavior, other ideas march in. They enter through a side door—call it the unarticulated or the unconscious—of Wharton’s subtle fiction.

***

. . . she was not meant for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury, it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in. But the luxury of others was not what she wanted
.

. . . Now she was beginning to chafe at the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the splendor which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way
. (I, 3, 23)

Lily pays by being charming and by trying to keep her reputation intact. A twentieth-century Clarissa, who even fights off a rape, Lily’s chastity is a series of questions. Purity? Property? Repression? Inhibition? Architecture is, among other things, about bodies living within structures built for bodies by bodies. Lily is subject, even prey, to assaults within two kinds of structures—external or social and internal or psychological. The exterior holds, conditions and is manifested in the interior, interiority inhabited and penetrated by the social. (If houses and ornaments are mated, psychologies are married to societies.)

She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston’s—its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers. To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere
. (I, 15, 118)

She had tried to mitigate this charmless background by a few frivolous touches . . . but the futility of the attempt struck her as she looked about the
room What a contrast to the subtle elegance of the setting she had pictured for herself—an apartment which should surpass the complicated luxury of her friends’ surroundings by the whole extent of that artistic sensibility which made herself feel their superior
. (I, 9, 86)

Lily wants her accommodations to fit her sense of superiority. But they usually don’t. She may even want a house or room, with its “almost human arms,” more than a man and marriage, a desire for which society traditionally punishes women. Living at her aunt’s, Mrs. Peniston—penal, penurious, penis—Lily must sleep and dream in a bedroom that’s “as dreary as a prison” (I, 9, 86). Since Wharton’s prisons are real spaces and metaphors, Lily’s mind and body are trapped not only in dreary rooms but also in the society whose customs shape her.

***

The survival of obsolete customs in architecture, which makes the study of sociology so interesting, has its parallel in the history of architecture
. (Decoration, 5)

Excremental things are all too intimately and inseparably bound up with sexual things . . .The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty; they have retained their animal cast; and so even today love, too, is in essence as animal as it ever was
.
³

Sigmund Freud and Edith Wharton were contemporaries. They lived during approximately the same years, Freud from 1856 to 1939,
Wharton 1866 to 1937. Freud was as interested in archeology as Wharton was in architecture; it was foundational for his thought. He mined it for metaphors and used it as analogues to human psychology. Wharton obviously had an interest in psychology, though it’s unlikely she read Freud. She was aware of him as every educated person would have been then, and wrote in a letter to Bernard Berenson, “Please ask Mary not to befuddle her with Freudianism and all its jargon”
⁴
Though she eschewed Freud’s “jargon,” Wharton understood the terms, the ground on which she built her characters. Wharton had a sophisticated understanding of psychology, and her treatment and development of Lily Bart shows her exploring some issues that Freud did. Differently, of course.

Beneath the customs of society lie what the Gothic, and ghost stories, point to: human anxieties and fears, needs and motives drive by desires and instincts not governable by reason. The vicissitudes of sex and sexuality, duty and morality, wreak havoc on Wharton’s characters, whether in this novel,
The Age of Innocence
, or
Madame de Treymes
. Wharton is the poet of oppression and repression, and attending to her project, she presents Lily with obstacles. Freud might call them neuroses. Whatever one calls them, “things” are in the way of Lily Bart’s ability to thrive.

The preciousness of Lily’s reputation reflects the irrational foundations of her world. Taboos about virginity mark both so-called primitive and civilized societies. They mask, Freud theorized, universal human fears about female sexuality and sexuality itself. Wharton’s female characters dwell and flail about in a troubled, transitional period (a very long moment that continues to the present). Like Freud, Wharton was nurtured in a Victorian
culture and then lived on into a newer, modern world. Like him, she studied the psychological effects on people resistant to, and transformed by, great cultural and social changes. (In
The Mother’s Recompense
, the mother flees her marriage, abandons her young daughter for her lover. Years later, the daughter whom she hasn’t seen since she ran away, will become engaged to that same man. It’s a cautionary Oedipal tale about what can happen if women chase after their desires. When the social order is overturned, duty and obligation ignored for siren freedom, Wharton intimates, incest is a possibility.)

Seated under the cheerless blaze of the drawing room chandelier—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was “company”—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dullness to a middle-age like Grace Stepney’s
. (I, 9, 80)

Inside this narrow world of prohibition and inhibition, Lily’s possibilities are limited. If Selden embodies Lily’s hopes, her Utopian vision, Grace Stepney personifies her fears of the nightmarish future—poverty, spinsterhood, social ugliness. The fear of turning into Grace alarms Lily as much as Selden’s freedom entices her.

Ah, there’s the difference—a girl must, a man may if he chooses . . . Your coat’s a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as herself. . . Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership. (I, 1, 12)

***

The social constraints for women are as clear as the crystal in the houses Wharton describes. But she proposes less obvious or visible constraints. Rarely insistent or repetitive, she is both about Lily’s beauty and her terror of dinginess. (Two sides of the same coin, they may constitute her fatal flaw.) Lily’s dread—“who wants a dingy woman?”—renders her incapable of happiness, even of living within her means. Even if one supposes one understands how Lily’s beauty works—as surface or appearance, as a manifestation of the sublime, as her difference from others, as artistic perfection and imperfection (the human golden bowl)—dinginess is still trickier, more obscure and difficult to grasp. But both refer to the liminal, mostly unseen relationship between interiors and exteriors.

Beauty and dinginess, beauty and the beast, depend upon each other. Dinginess isn’t brilliant, sublime, perfect, but dirty, tainted, dark, discolored, worn, or spoiled, used and disgusting. (The word “dingy” may come from the word “dinghy,” a small boat or vessel that sails by the side of larger vessels.) Lily’s mother instills the terror of it in her. Mrs. Bart’s greatest “reproach” to her husband is that he expected her to become dingy or “live like a pig” (I, 3, 26), one of Freud’s animals. (Anality comes to mind.) Treated with indifference and contempt, Mr. Bart’s a cash machine to his wife and to Lily, who has more sympathy for him. After he loses his money, his failure and inadequacy in Mrs. Bart’s eyes are made complete when he dies and leaves them poor, ruined.

After two years of hungry roaming, Mrs. Bart had died—of a deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year
. (I, 3, 30)

To Miss Bart, as to her mother, acquiescence in dinginess was evidence of stupidity; and there were moments when, in the consciousness of her own power to look and be so exactly what the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were plain and inferior from choice
. (I, 8, 70)

Mrs. Peniston’s opulent interior was at least not externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality that assumes all manner of disguises; and Lily soon found it was as latent in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift existence of a continental pension
. (I, 3, 31)

Dinginess isn’t ever simple wear and tear. Contrasted again and again to brilliance, light, the sun, glow (as if Wharton were a Manichee), the dark and dirty that Lily fears and names dinginess emanates from what she doesn’t know and can’t see. There’s no clarity, no bright light by which to see these appalling, unconscious forces that threaten her every step. Stupidity, as dullness, is also dinginess (though for her to shine too brilliantly could attract unwanted attention and failure). But Lily is stupid before the irrational. Wharton knew everyone was.

In an extraordinary passage, Lily worries that Mrs. Peniston (“To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor” [I, 3, 32]) has been “too passive,” has not helped her enough socially;
but Lily also fears she herself has “not been passive enough” and too “eager” (I, 3, 33).

Younger and plainer girls had been married off by the dozens, and she was nine and twenty and still Miss Bart
.

She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself but what manner of life would it be? . . . She was too intelligent not to be honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again against its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch
. (I, 3, 33)

She fights against being ruined. It’s a struggle to the death that she loses, one beyond her control, fought blindly, unconsciously. For a smart girl, Lily often acts impulsively and against her interests. But Wharton sometimes confounds the reader who is attempting to decide what is in her interest. Maybe nothing is. Even if Lily knew what her interests were, she might not be able to stop herself or control herself, for reasons she cannot know.

***

The question persists: If plainer and stupider girls could marry, why can’t Lily? Marriage’s promise is not just economic and social partnership, but also sexual union. Terror of sex and sexuality, of being made dingy, may be a piece of Lily’s unmarriageability,
inscribed in her body as attenuated virginity. Intent upon weaving surface and foundation, Wharton lets Lily’s body and interior speak society’s prohibitive customs and conventions.

(Imagining a character’s psychology can be as “slippery” as the “bright pinnacles of success” Lily can’t reach. But Wharton looks hard at Lily, as a condition, as a symptom of social injustice, restriction, inhibition, repression, oppression, as an unstable object in an uncertain structure. She scrutinizes her with a kind of clinical neutrality.

The chief difference between the merely sympathetic and the creative imagination is that the latter is two-sided, and combines with the power of penetrating into other minds that of standing far enough aloof from them to see beyond, and relate them to the whole stuff of life out of which they partially emerge. Such an all-round view can be obtained only by mounting to a height; and that height, in art, is proportioned to the artist’s power of detaching one part of his imagination from the particular problem in which the rest is steeped
. (Writing, 15)