The naturalism of Edith Wharton's 'House of Mirth.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1995 by Donald Pizer

Edith Wharton's effort in The House of Mirth to excoriate the nexus between sex and money in turn-of-the-century upper-class New York life and to reveal the tragic effects of a society of this kind upon a sensitive young woman has been recognized from the publication of the novel in 1905. Criticism of the day, however, and indeed for the next half-century, shied away from an identification of these themes with literary naturalism. The fictional worlds of Norris, Crane, and Dreiser, the naturalists of Wharton's generation, appeared so distant from those of Wharton that the almost inevitable tendency of the literary historian, as revealed most notably in a well-known section of Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds, was to consider Wharton and Dreiser as antithetical tendencies in early twentieth-century American expression.

A notable attempt, however, to free Wharton criticism from this conventional assumption occurred in 1953, when Blake Nevius observed that Lily Bart, in The House of Mirth, is "as completely and typically the product of her heredity, environment, and the historical moment ... as the protagonist of any recognized naturalistic novel" (57). Although Nevius failed to pursue this insight, it nevertheless became, if not a critical commonplace, at least one of the options for a way into the complexities of this pivotal work in Wharton's career.(1)

Indeed, in recent years, with the emphasis in critical discourse on the controlling role of the contemporary moment in shaping the beliefs and values both of fictional characters and of their authors, the idea that The House of Mirth can best be read as a form of naturalistic fiction has often been endorsed. In much of this commentary the attempt has been to refine the gross categories of naturalistic determinism into the fine gold of recent critical preoccupations. Above all, the specific deterministic character of Lily's social environment has received a number of full readings. Whether Lily's fate is shaped by the capitalistic exchange values of her society or by its patriarchal power structure or by some variation of these two central readings in contemporary criticism of the novel,(2) it is now common--whether or not the critic employs the terms of naturalistic criticism--to view the work as in the naturalistic camp.

Absent from almost all of this recent reexamination of The House of Mirth, however, is an effort to reconcile a view of Lily Bart as naturalistic victim of her world and Wharton's bold and concerted attempt, at the close of the work, to modify or counter an interpretation of this kind. We seem to have returned, in this respect, to the critical climate of the 1930s, when the need to view fiction in specific cultural terms because of the social work which this reading could provide led to a simplification of the novels of such figures as Norris and Dreiser. The rediscovery of Wharton as a naturalist, in other words, has also led to the redeployment in her case of the critical assumption that American naturalism in its various forms is an unqualified representation of social determinism in action. It is this assumption about The House of Mirth which I wish to test.

Even the casual reader of The House of Mirth is made aware throughout the work that Edith Wharton had been reading widely in social evolutionary theory of her day3 and that she was applying much of its central belief about the insignificance of individual will in relation to social environment (including belief and value as conditions of environment) to Lily Bart. Thus, with Wharton using the conventional language and imagery of a pessimistic environmental determinism--of man as not merely related to or dependent on his social setting but as destructively imprisoned by it--we are told during the course of Lily and Selden's first encounter that "She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate" (7). Lily herself, unlike many contemporary naturalistic protagonists, is fully aware of her condition as one bound by her social matrix. When Gerty Farish later in the novel seeks to comfort Lily by asking her to tell "her story ... from the beginning," Lily responds, "Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose--in the way I was brought up, and things I was taught to care for" (226).

These and many similar overt efforts to link Lily to a naturalistic context of social determinism (e.g., 39, 262)--to say nothing of the implicit rendering of Lily in this context, as pointed out by much recent criticism, through scene, action, and metaphor--is brought to a head and summed up in two often-cited passages toward the close of the work, when Lily fully realizes both the nature of her social conditioning and its baleful effect on her life. "She had learned by experience," Wharton comments, "that she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines.... Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock" (301). To nail down the deterministic implications of this conventional biological image, Wharton shortly thereafter joins it with an equally conventional mechanistic metaphor. Lily tells Selden during their last interview, "I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else" (308). And to make sure that we do not consider Lily a special case, Wharton uses, though less often, the same language of imprisonment in a social matrix to describe the seemingly free and independent Selden. We are told that "He had meant to keep free from permanent ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a different way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment" (151-52). He has acquired from his mother, Wharton explains, the qualities of mind and taste which are the source of his damaging ambivalence toward Lily--"his detachment from the sumptuary side of life; the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean's pleasure in them" (152).