From tea to chloral: raising the dead Lily Bart - character in woman author Edith Wharton's book 'The House of Mirth'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Bonnie Lynn Gerard

"Gad! what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach - " - The House of Mirth (309)

Much has been made of the "square envelopes" fashionable society "showered" upon the "hall-table" of young Lily Bart's New York home (44). Much has also been made of the consequent "oblong envelopes" - constant reminders of the price of fashion - that were "allowed to gather dust in the depth of a bronze jar" (44).(1) But the invitation and the bill are not the only envelopes tyrannizing Lily's society. Fashionable New York is equally subject to the "tyranny of the stomach," if less conspicuously so (309). Wharton's New York society in The House of Mirth is, without doubt, a consuming society, both figuratively and literally. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell and Elizabeth Ammons, among others, have noted, America's turn-of-the-century leisured class displayed its incomparable wealth by engaging in what Thorstein Veblen terms the "conspicuous consumption" of material goods (75). Appropriately, Wharton would have us imagine her consuming materialists through metaphors of food and digestion: George Dorset's "mournful dyspeptic" temper; Gus Trenor's "carnivorous head"; Carry Fisher's "general air of embodying a 'spicy paragraph'"; and Ned Silverton's tendency to be "critical of truffles" (85-87). Silverton even observes, with "Titanic pessimism" (we might add "naturalism"), that "a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the universe" (309). As it happens, his off-hand prediction rings true for Lily Bart, as Dorset's gastric distress signifies his more threatening marital distress, a distress whose ultimate relief requires that "a woman's life" - her own - be "ruined" (309).

From Dorset's troubled marriage to Lily's struggle in the marriage market, The House of Mirth depicts characters whose psychological and physiological lives are consumed by a society with a voracious appetite for status. Lily Bart's pursuit of social status as an empowered consumer presents her with a paradox: in order to become a consumer she must first present herself as an item to be consumed. For Lily, this paradox becomes a seesaw of conflicting social and psychological needs that seem opposed to such a degree of inevitability that one begins to wonder about the role of literary naturalism in the novel.(2) Indeed, recent years have seen renewed interest in the influences of American and German naturalism on Wharton's writing. Donald Pizer observes that "it is now common" to view The House of Mirth in particular as "in the naturalistic camp" ("The Naturalism" 242). While he notes that studies of literary naturalism have in the past almost entirely neglected Wharton's novels, largely because she was not male and did not often write about the lower classes, he affirms those who have initiated the "rediscovery" of Wharton as a naturalist novelist ("American Naturalism" 127).(3) This rediscovery, in the case of The House of Mirth, has been based on abundant textual evidence suggesting that Wharton, fully conversant with the tenets and tropes of naturalistic philosophy and fiction, consciously depicted Lily Bart as a victim of her social environment. The naturalistic "language of imprisonment" is so pervasive, in fact, that in his most recent comments on the novel Pizer has offered only two exceptions to its seemingly ubiquitous law of social determinism - Nettie Struther and Lawrence Selden - one triumphing over her environment through pure strength of will, the other transcending it through faith, albeit unsubstantiated, in human possibility ("The Naturalism" 244-46).(4)

But even those who find Wharton modifying conventional naturalism by offering occasional exceptions to the rule of social determinism might nonetheless pronounce Lily Bart's life and death clearly naturalistic.(5) After all, she dies a victim of her own lack of moral courage, which is to say, a victim of the social environment that created in her such a lack. The self-conscious irony of Wharton's naturalism, however, makes such a reading of Lily's death problematic. Taking naturalism to figurative extremes, Wharton expends considerable creative effort throughout the novel to construct a pattern of imagery and behavior, both overt and implied, that suggests on the surface the merely animalistic nature of the society in which Lily moves. A product of that environment, Lily herself responds to environmental stimuli often with the same motivation for self-preservation ("how on earth am I to keep myself alive?" [430]) that a scientific naturalist might have observed in the wild. Despite such social conditioning in a most "debasing" environment, however, Lily emerges capable of committing an independent act of will, nearly indistinguishable though it is from an act of unwilling submission (Wharton, A Backward Glance 207). Wharton insists that we notice her heroine's act of will, even if it is the most "inconspicuous" act in the novel, because it betrays the peculiar romanticism distinguishing The House of Mirth from other naturalist novels (Yeazell 713). Few readers will be willing to make this distinction. Yeazell concludes that Lily's act of burning Bertha Dorset's letters is no more than "the faltering pulse of resistance" (731). Dale Bauer, likewise, finds only in Wharton's later fiction a reconsideration of anthropological theories she had earlier "endorsed" (31). But if The House of Mirth endorses naturalism, it does so hesitatingly and incompletely. Lily's struggle for subjectivity beyond the limits imposed on human experience by a naturalistic environment represents an early indication of what would later become Wharton's ambivalence toward strict Darwinian theories of social determinism. If a naturalistic universe results from, as Paul Civello suggests, "the collapse of humanity's conception of an order in the material world, an order that had formerly imbued the world with meaning" (2), then Lily's act of will gestures towards an alternative epistemology, making her dying moment something akin to a Kantian moment of sublime transcendence, wherein "the surface is broken, the discourse breaks down, and the faculties are checked or suspended: a discontinuity opens between what can be grasped and what is felt to be meaningful" (Weiskel 21).(6)