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

To interpret such moments of resistance as acts of moral courage, however, would be a mistake. It is clear that Lily's morality amounts to little more than a sense of social propriety, in which right action is made possible by "instinctive resistances, of taste, of training, of blind inherited scruples" (168). Wharton reflects in A Backward Glance that New York society's frivolity becomes interesting only in its "power of debasing people and ideas" (207). Lily's capacity for moral ideas in the context of that society seems, accordingly, debased, reduced to instinctive responses to material circumstances. But if "she could not breathe long on the heights" of social "indignation," her dilemma is precisely that "it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region" (421,422). Other regions do exist, of course, but for Lily they have not as yet proved habitable. On more than one occasion, Selden suggests his willingness to "take her beyond - beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul - " (249). Such an escape, indeed, may satisfy the one need that seems to humanize Lily: her need for human intimacy. She occasionally remarks, with translucent flippancy, that what she wants more than a suitor "is a friend" (12). But to travel with Selden into his "republic of the spirit" requires that Lily suppress her longings for the society of the material in which she has been brought up to seek her place. Wharton is clear about Lily's reasons for resisting Selden: Lily admits unreservedly that she is "horribly poor - and very expensive" (4). That Lily has been raised to view money as life's one true necessity surprises no one who reads the novel as naturalistic. It is Lily's social environment, her "bringing-up" (278) among extravagant people, that must be blamed for forming in Lily such a need for luxurious living. Even the "promise of rescue in [Selden's] love" must only be "a moment's shelter" and not her "ultimate refuge" (280). When Lily finally feels desperate enough to turn to Selden's love as "her only hope," the chance circumstance (also a convention of naturalism) of his having seen her leaving Trenor's house the night before causes him to leave town, leaving her stranded and alone.(12)

Lily cannot inhabit Selden's "republic of the spirit" or, for that matter, Gerty Farish's "poor slit of a room," because of its lack of funds (271). As Gerty puts it, "Lily might be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally incapable of living without it" (261). And in Wharton's depiction, such an incapacity seems far from a matter of will; it is an environmentally cultivated "physical distaste" (271). Lily feels a "growing distaste for her task" once reduced to the status of a working-class hat trimmer at Mme. Regina's (462). Social status and physical status become inseparable to Lily, as "perhaps from increasing physical weariness" she begins "to feel acutely the ugliness and discomfort of her surroundings" (464). Curiously, though, at this point neither can she inhabit the world of the Gormers and Mrs. Hatch - for the opposite reason. While with them, she basks in the "renewed habit of luxury - the daily waking to an assured absence of care and presence of material ease" (381). But material ease in itself seems not to be enough, for it "gradually blunted her appreciation of these values, and left her more conscious of the void they could not fill" (381). Lily's feeling of "pure physical satisfaction," no less than the opposite feeling of physical discomfort, leaves her feeling "the long disgust of her days" (445).