The House of Mirth

March 31, 2021 by Amy Welborn

I had decent intentions on Wednesday. I was going to get some work done. That’s always the decent intention on my plate. That didn’t happen, though. Edith Wharton took over my life.

I was about halfway through The House of Mirth at the beginning of the day, picked it up in the afternoon, and then..well, couldn’t put it down. I suppose part of it was procrastination and avoidance, as it is when you have a task waiting for you and somehow, cleaning the bathroom seems much more enticing. Because, you know, I may be avoiding work, but I’m Reading Literature, so it all evens out, right?

Anyway, I obviously enjoyed it quite a bit, didn’t know anything about it, and was gripped as the book surged to its clearly inevitable but still sad and you-just-want-to-shake-everyone ending.

In House of Mirth, her first novel, Wharton digs deep into her natural milieu – New York aristocracy – spreads them all out and leaves them to roast in the sun of her blistering gaze.

It is, of course, a society built not only wealth, but appearance and manner. You know the drill. I don’t need to explain it to you. It’s an essentially dark place, made even darker, unintentionally, by Wharton’s thoroughly secular perspective. There’s no redemption on earth or in heaven, it seems.

Is it a tale instructive to us for what it says about women and women’s place in this society? Perhaps, but I think it’s unwise to emphasize that. Yes, women are stuck and trapped and have little choice or freedom, but the men are not too many steps ahead of them. It is certainly acceptable and expected for a man to work (not too hard, though) and have a profession – not a job, but a profession – which is almost unthinkable for a woman of this class – but the whole system is a carefully constructed, controlled and controlling trap for everyone, one in which deviation and independence is always reason for excommunication.

The tragedy of the pieces is that a few of these characters, our heroine Lily Bart included, at times can see the falsity of it all, but can never get the courage to truly step away once and for all.

Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend’s plight, and her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her that Lily, for the present, had no wish for the kind of help she could give. Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized and detached from its old associations; whereas all Lily’s energies were centered in the determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could be maintained.

Along with the tragedy is an injustice – that Lily suffers the most, even though she has done not a thing wrong, and her judgmental accusers, as they do, continue to flourish.

I adore Wharton’s writing. Her sharpness of perception, her patient excavation of character, and the skill she has at conveying a busy scene with clarity and dark wit is addictive.

That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were! Lily reviewed them with a scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying a “spicy paragraph”; young Silverton, who had meant to live on proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends and had become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated visiting-list, whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording of invitations and the engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with his perpetual nervous nod of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with people before he knew what they were saying; Jack Stepney, with his confident smile and anxious eyes, half way between the sheriff and an heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all the guileless confidence of a young girl who has always been told that there is no one richer than her father.

Phew.

Here she masterfully unpacks a subtle, but unmistakable slight:

She dropped the menu abruptly, with a quick heightening of colour, and Gerty, following her glance, was aware of the advance, from an inner room, of a party headed by Mrs. Trenor and Carry Fisher. It was impossible for these ladies and their companions—among whom Lily had at once distinguished both Trenor and Rosedale—not to pass, in going out, the table at which the two girls were seated; and Gerty’s sense of the fact betrayed itself in the helpless trepidation of her manner. Miss Bart, on the contrary, borne forward on the wave of her buoyant grace, and neither shrinking from her friends nor appearing to lie in wait for them, gave to the encounter the touch of naturalness which she could impart to the most strained situations. Such embarrassment as was shown was on Mrs. Trenor’s side, and manifested itself in the mingling of exaggerated warmth with imperceptible reservations. Her loudly affirmed pleasure at seeing Miss Bart took the form of a nebulous generalization, which included neither enquiries as to her future nor the expression of a definite wish to see her again. Lily, well-versed in the language of these omissions, knew that they were equally intelligible to the other members of the party: even Rosedale, flushed as he was with the importance of keeping such company, at once took the temperature of Mrs. Trenor’s cordiality, and reflected it in his off-hand greeting of Miss Bart. Trenor, red and uncomfortable, had cut short his salutations on the pretext of a word to say to the head-waiter; and the rest of the group soon melted away in Mrs. Trenor’s wake.
It was over in a moment—the waiter, menu in hand, still hung on the result of the choice between Coupes Jacques and Peches a la Melba —but Miss Bart, in the interval, had taken the measure of her fate. Where Judy Trenor led, all the world would follow; and Lily had the doomed sense of the castaway who has signalled in vain to fleeing sails.

There is much conversation today – and has been for a while, and should be – about literary canons, and what is taught and what is relevant. I’m an advocate of reading widely and deeply – which is why I appreciate the Norton anthology we’re using. My College Kid used it last year and we just kept it – three volumes of excerpts from what you’d expect and what your grandparents probably read in American literature, including Wharton – but also expanding the vision to writings from all kinds of people who have lived and created on this continent.

That said, there are reasons works become canonical – most of the time it’s because they express truth, not only about a specific time and place, but about human life in general. In reading them, we can see how times have changed, but how human nature really doesn’t.

The House of Mirth is a close look at a society long ago and far away, peopled by characters who, on the surface, have nothing in common with a young (or older) person in the 21^st century. But of course, it has much more in common than a quick survey indicates, and in the hands of a good teacher, a reading of a book like this would be fruitful, entertaining and illuminating. There are, of course the obvious moral questions and questions of the decisions and choices characters make. But even further, using this time, place and these tensions as a mirror, you could challenge students to think of their own circles, most great and small, and what they know about the wider social and cultural scene in America today….

We may look at the upper crust New Yorkers of the late 19^th century and pity them for their lack of freedom, trapped as they are in their gilded cage – are we really so much freer? These characters are subject to harsh judgments and constant threat of disapproval and exile. What social judgments are handed down on people today? By what means? What are the pressures and threats that we experience to conform? What’s the price if we don’t?

Wharton’s characters are overwhelming concerned with matters within their own set, with fashion and fashionable pursuits and amusements. Sound familiar?

Lily and almost every other character compromises in one way or another. Is that something that only people in this time, place and social structure did, or….do human beings, even in a “freer” social setting, still make compromises? Is that always a negative…or is it just…life?

Consider the source of the title (quoted below) – where do you see the truth of that today? In the life you know? In society in general?

And then, on every page, it seems, there’s an observation about human nature that still rings so very true:

If she was faintly aware of fresh difficulties ahead, she was sure of her ability to meet them: it was characteristic of her to feel that the only problems she could not solve were those with which she was familiar.

There is a film based on the book, but looking at the strange casting – I’ll just call it miscasting, almost top-to-bottom – and the mostly negative reviews out there, I passed. I’d much rather let these sad fools live on in my imagination.