Aesthetics of Self-Management: Intelligence, Capital, and The House of Mirth, The

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2009 by Mullen, Patrick

Whether ultimately seen as indicative of the conservative or progressive political sensibilities of the author, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart has been predominantly framed as a tragic victim caught within the irresistible market forces of capitalism and the fatal contradictions of gender and class politics.1 Lawrence Seiden is the key character in the novel to promote this tragic reading of Lily and her situation, as he views her as hopelessly swayed by the crude materialism of her class and the vain obsessions of her sex. Seiden also serves as a foil who brings into relief her seemingly ruinous and sharply gendered shortcomings: where Lily cannot see beyond the brilliant sheen of her limited and wealthy social sphere, Seiden is able to distance himself from worldly concerns; where Lily is obsessed with fin de siècle decadence, Seiden is motivated by reason and virtue; where the sharp-witted Lily is driven to a thoughtless death, meditative Seiden lives to contemplate the lessons that Lily's demise offers. This understanding of the tragedy of Lily's fall distills longstanding Enlightenment notions of the human, knowledge production, and their relation to the forces of capital: the human stands apart from the material forces of the market; reason operates autonomously in a sphere beyond the demands of the economy; and finally, the masculine intellect thinks freely in the abstract realm of reason, a realm that the feminine sentiments, shackled to the physicality of the body, will never achieve.

In this essay I argue that the seeming weaknesses of Lily's character - her gendered embodiment and embedded position within the forces of the capitalist market - are actually, from the point of view of the novel as a whole, key strengths that allow Wharton to frame possibilities for critical thinking from within the forces of capitalism. In particular, the aesthetic of the novel emerges as a way for Wharton to theorize possibilities for critical intelligence that attempt to redirect the fatal forces of capital while immanent to the flow of these forces. I situate this immanent and embodied intelligence within the context of American philosophy, in particular in relation to the early psychological theories of William James on thought's relationship to subjectivity and Henry Adams's theories on emergent formations of the intellectual.2 The argument unfolds in three parts: I first examine the early psychological work of James to construct a model of intelligent embodiment in what Bruce W. Wilshire refers to as "the body-subject" (James, xxv). James's work will help to structure an understanding of the materialist aspects of Lily's intellect and of the intellectual aspects of Lily's physicality. Next, I look at the socialization of this individuated body-subject and suggest Adams's theory of a uniquely American managerial form of intelligence as a way to decipher the dynamics of Lily's complex character.3

This managerial intelligence emerges in Wharton's novel in the form of a feminine aesthetic that Lily embodies; it will be characterized by its immanence to the realities of capital, its celerity, its responsiveness, and finally by its level of success. A central difficulty for this aesthetic managerial intelligence is the problem of reproduction. Where the Enlightenment notion of humanist knowledge had defined - in theory - its own temporality and reproduction in its transhistorical status and its progressive trajectories, Lily's self-managerial aesthetic is a form of intelligence whose temporality and reproduction are immanent to capital. It is an intelligence of the moment that operates until the deal is made, when it dissipates and must be reorganized for the next deal. It is an intelligence that is functional - if it works, it works. It does not secure a knowledge beyond the economics of success. In the final part of the essay I argue that this self-managerial aesthetic is a form of social labor whose capitalized temporality is brought into focus and arrested by the form of the novel itself, which is able in a sense to freeze its celerity and to offer it as an object of thought, opening it to the dynamics of intellectual reproduction and to continued critical thinking.

The philosophical interest in the problem of thought stems from the novel itself. In broad strokes the novel can be divided into two parts that specifically point to a crisis of thinking. In the first part of the novel, Lily Bart is an "illuminated intelligence" (Wharton 52) who has the "gift of following an undercurrent of thought while she appear[s] to be sailing on the surface of conversation" (41). She is the "girl who has no one to think for her [who] is obliged to think for herself" (81). The second half of the novel marks the destruction of her ability to think. In the wake of Gus Trenor's violent assault, Lily articulates her crisis in relation to thought: "But with the turn of the wheels reaction came, and shuddering darkness closed on her. 1 can't think - I can't think,' she moaned, and leaned her head against the rattling side of the cab" (150). Refusing George Dorset's invitation to save herself at the expense of the ruin of his wife, Bertha, Lily begins to mark the annulment of her intellectual powers through their stupefication: " 'You sacrifice us both,' she continued to repeat, as if it were a charm: 'I know nothing - absolutely nothing' " (235). By the close of the novel, her physical demise and the impending final destruction of her intellect, the ultimate cessation of thought, appear hand in hand: