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

Lily's disgust resonates with that of her mother, who "died of a deep disgust," leaving the reader with an uncanny sense of the circularity of the novel's naturalistic trajectory (55). But Wharton's choice of a gustatory phrase to describe Lily's feeling of social alienation points both to the naturalistic patterns governing the novel's social determinism and to the ways in which Wharton struggles to negotiate a romantic ending out of a tenaciously naturalistic narrative. The irony of the novel's naturalism materializes in Lily's downward spiral of drug use. If rituals of material consumption serve only to satisfy the basest of appetites in a status-hungry society, Wharton would have those very rituals consume those who most rigorously observe them. Lily's self-destructive consumption, first of tea and finally of chloral, ends by consuming her physically and emotionally, betokening her social failure. Her increasing dependence on substances begins with a dramatic shift in her tea-taking habits following her rejection of Rosedale's second offer. No longer the center of attention at the tea table ("society . . . simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive" [422]), Lily seeks refuge among Gerty Farish's humble tea cups. But instead of her usual elegance and grace, she appears wildly out of control, "starting up with a vehemence that threatened destruction to Miss Farish's fragile tea-table" (427). Socially distraught, Lily cannot maintain her physical composure. And while tea itself seemed before to supply only an excuse for self-display, it now comes to be desired for its physical effects. Suffering from sleeplessness, Lily pleads with Gerty for more tea: "another, and stronger, please; if I don't keep awake now I shall see horrors tonight - perfect horrors!" (427). Out of discomfort and anxiety, Lily feels too weary to face the day - better to sleep, except that if she sleeps during the day she cannot sleep at night. Rather than face the "horrors" when "everything stands by the bed and stares," Lily takes the tea (265). Despite Gerty's warning that the horrors will "be worse if you drink too much tea," Lily "imperiously" demands it - "give it to me" - with a "dangerous edge" to her voice (428). Caffeine is not the only drug available for Lily's consumption. But if Lily admits to Miss Kilroy that she is "not particularly well," she knows only too well that her real "headache" will not go away if she were only to "try orangeine" (463).

Even the chloral Lily begins consuming provides only a temporary respite from physical exhaustion. She takes the drug as a sleep agent: "the mere touch of the packet thrilled her tired nerves with the delicious promise of a night of sleep" (466). As is appropriate in a novel endorsing social determinism, Lily's failed pursuit of social happiness leaves her in withdrawals, with the "dark spirit of fatigue and loneliness crouched upon her breast," hardly distinguishable in nature from the physical sensation of drug dependence (479). Indeed, for the thoroughgoing naturalist, the human being is simply "one material phenomenon in a universe of material phenomena," whose actions, both rational and emotional, can be reduced to scientifically observable chemical reactions (Civello 2, 9). Lily's drug use, in this light, seems only natural, as does her last-ditch effort to use her relationship with Rosedale to regain a social foothold. But both of these efforts fail, and the reason seems to be the insurgent impulse within her to satisfy that elusive other need that is not material. When she passes by "a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street" and observes a crowd of "women and girls, all too much engaged in the rapid absorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance," she is "not hungry," nor is she concerned that these busy crowds have no status to offer her; instead she is "craving a responsive glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble" (488). In between their "hurried gulps of tea," Lily feels "a sudden pang of profound loneliness" (488-89).