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

Early in the novel, Wharton suggests that for Lily, there is a "discontinuity" between "what can be grasped" - materially, rationally - and "what is felt to be meaningful" through some more elusive means of apprehension. Ironically, Lily imagines this discontinuity to be a matter of heredity and environment, as she reflects that she has inherited from her parents two opposing natures.

She attributes her practical, materialistic nature to her mother, whose "own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the world" (48). A "wonderful manager" of funds, whose worst fear was that she should be forced to "live like a pig" (46, 47), Mrs. Bart was of the opinion that her husband "had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as 'reading poetry,'" and "there was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source" (54). Lily has at least romantic, if not Romantic, tendencies. The tension generated by this conflict between Lily's romanticism and her materialism indicates the tension animating most of the human conflicts in Wharton's novels. In The Fruit of the Tree, written just two years after The House of Mirth, John Amherst concludes that "the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth" (609). The language of Amherst's metaphoric construction, both organic and spiritual, reflecting the novel's framework of opposing forces, evokes the neoplatonic realms of the material and the spiritual. Here, material circumstances ranging from genetics to social conventions, practical work, and the mundane threaten to extinguish the human expression of passion and will, idealistic commitment, the extraordinary, and, in Darwinian terms, the individual as opposed to the race.(7) Wharton finds these categories useful in describing the many biological and social circumstances preventing her characters from achieving spiritual fulfillment through truly meaningful relationships. Amherst's metaphor of the organism surviving only in its proper element suggests a curious collusion between naturalism and romanticism that allows the rift between material and spiritual demands to be mystically, if only fleetingly, repaired. Though the moment of intellectual and spiritual union between Amherst and Justine, like the transplanted organism, fades under the pressures of material being, it nonetheless points to a transcendent realm of belief and moral action in which Wharton's characters can respond to their environment in more than just animalistic ways.(8)