House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [13]
Lily’s marriage to Gryce, Dorset, or Rosedale would have been, like Edith’s to Teddy Wharton, essentially meaningless. She loves only Selden. But she refuses to marry him, for financial reasons, when he’s willing to marry her; and he refuses to marry her, for moral reasons, when she’s willing to marry him. When he finally realizes her true worth, it’s too late. During their six meetings—in his apartment, at Bellomont, at the Brys’ tableaux, in Monte Carlo, in Norma Hatch’s hotel room, and again in his apartment on the day of her death—Selden has fine manners but no heart. A cold and fatally vacillating prig, he avoids true intimacy and cannot respond to her passionate feelings. He likes the idea of Lily more than Lily herself. Though he often comes to the “rescue,” he never really rescues her. He assumes the role of moral advisor while having an affair with another man’s wife, and he expresses emotions in his letters to Bertha that he cannot reveal to Lily.
Though the novel has two redemptive declassé, or working-class, women, Gerty Farish and Nettie Struthers, all the men are portrayed negatively. Selden (like Lily’s father) is well meaning but ineffectual; Gryce a milksop and a bore; Trenor a liar and swindler, a betrayer and would-be rapist; Silverton a phony; Dorset a crude and pathetic cuckold; Rosedale a pushy manipulator. In The House of Mirth, as Irving Howe observed, “human beings seem always to prove inadequate, always to fail each other, always to be victims of an innate disharmony between love and response, need and capacity.” 26
Lily Bart, a camp follower in the army of pleasure, is both a victim and heroine, who despises the society she’s trying to enter. She’s respectable but doesn’t maintain a respectable facade; compromises herself but cannot save herself; and never quite realizes the enormity of her situation. Both extremely conventional and dangerously impulsive, she’s foolish about her rashness and opportunities, finances and obligations, loyalty and sacrifices. With no parents or money to protect her, smoking and gambling, borrowing money and associating with dubious companions, she’s fatally compromised when seen leaving Selden’s apartment and Trenor’s townhouse, and again when she is forced to remain alone at night with Dorset.
Lily descends from the strict, puritanical Penniston-Gryce-Van Osburgh circle, and the more lenient Trenors and Dorsets, who allow ladies to smoke and gamble, to the conspicuously consuming Wellington Brys and the pleasure-loving Gormers, to the flashy upstart Norma Hatch. In the course of her descent Lily works as a social secretary for Judy Trenor, supplementary hostess and scapegoat for Bertha Dorset, social manager for Norma Hatch, and incompetent seamstress for the milliner. Finally, she joins the ranks of the unemployed. The reader winces at her series of social humiliations: she’s assaulted by Gus, brutally dismissed by Bertha, cut by the Trenors at the restaurant, betrayed by Grace and disinherited by Julia, rebuffed by Rosedale, fired by the milliner, abandoned by Selden, and bad-mouthed by everyone.
Wharton emphasizes throughout that Lily is alone in the world. When Selden joins Lily at Bellomont—and she lies to, abandons, and loses Gryce—Selden thinks, after seeing her that morning in a moment of intimate disarray, “That is how she looks when she is alone!” (p. 74). The thought of her in solitude excites him and finally provokes him to propose to her in a characteristically half-hearted fashion. He has the rare ability, she later notes, to draw out her real self, which “was so little accustomed to go alone!” (p. 102). In the final chapter, when he rushes, too late, to her room in the boarding house and discovers her dead, Gerty leaves the room and Selden stands “alone with the motionless sleeper on the bed