House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [12]
Lily returns to New York to find that Grace Stepney has told her aunt that Lily lost money gambling and that Gus Trenor has paid her bills, poisoning the severe and disapproving Julia Peniston against her. Horrified by Lily’s behavior, Julia disinherits her and leaves $400,000 to Grace. Lily’s legacy, though only a fraction of Grace’s inheritance, would still be a sizable sum—if she didn’t owe most of it to Gus. When Lily tries to borrow money from Grace, as she previously tried to borrow from Julia, Grace gives the same sanctimonious refusal as her aunt.
Carry told Lily that George Dorset would be eager to marry her after he divorced Bertha. George is completely uncultured: he describes the opera as “caterwauling” and is “as difficult to amuse as a savage.” But he reveals the sensitive and vulnerable side of his character when he tells Lily that she can set him free if she will provide evidence of Bertha’s infidelity. Yet Lily refuses to take revenge against her enemy and rehabilitate herself in society.
Lily’s refusal to help Dorset means she can only save herself by marrying Simon Rosedale. At the beginning of the novel Rosedale is described with all the repulsive anti-Semitic clichés of Wharton’s class and time. He “had his race’s accuracy in the appraisal of values” (p. 18) and all the “business astuteness which characterizes his race” (p. 19). He’s “fat and shiny, and has a shoppy manner!” (p. 88), and pushy and insensitive, he’s compared to a bluebottle fly that bangs itself against the window panes of fashionable drawing rooms. Wharton twice calls him “the little Jew”—the very phrase Virginia Woolf used to describe her devoted husband, Leonard.
During the Edwardian era, when The House of Mirth was published, Jews had an ambiguous place in English and American society, which despised and accepted them. Benjamin Disraeli had been prime minister in Victoria’s reign and Rufus Isaacs became Lord Chief Justice in 1913. King Edward VII was philo-Semitic at a time when the German Kaiser demeaned Jews and the Russian Czar persecuted them in pogroms. Czar Nicholas II was astonished to find the Jewish railroad tycoon and horse breeder, Baron Hirsch, among the guests at Edward’s estate at Sandringham. The Rothschilds and Sassoons, and the South African Randlords, with great fortunes from diamonds and gold, played a prominent part in English society. They also paved the way for the social acceptance of the leading Jewish financiers in America.
In the course of the novel Rosedale rises as Lily descends. He becomes increasingly sympathetic and cares much more than Selden does about her desperate situation. Rosedale’s proposal to Lily—“I’ve got the money ... and what I want is the woman—and I mean to have her too” (p. 187)—provides a crude commercial contrast to Lily’s lyrical moments with Selden at Bellomont and after her tableau. But when she next meets Rosedale, the increasingly desperate Lily—who’s squandered her chances with Dillworth and the Italian prince as well as with Gryce, Selden, and Dorset—is moved by his tender concern and interrupts his impassioned declaration by prematurely announcing: “I do believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale ... and I am ready to marry you whenever you wish” (p. 269). Rosedale then frankly explains that though he loves her as much as ever, she’s no longer in a position to help him enter society. He’s not willing to marry her unless, with his backing, she uses the letters to regain her friendship with Bertha and get back into the society that has excluded her. She refuses Rosedale