House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [9]
This apparently trivial meeting with Selden establishes Lily’s heedless nature and determines her future. On her way out, she passes a charwoman scrubbing the stairs on her hands and knees, and has another chance encounter, this time with Simon Rosedale, “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery” (p. 17). In the first of many lies, she tells Rosedale that she’s been to her dressmaker, though as the owner of the building he knows there are no dressmakers on the premises. Several motifs in this chapter reverberate throughout the novel: dinginess, which Lily abhors but which overwhelms her at the end; mirrors and the duality of her nature; transparent lies (for she’s basically honest and a poor liar); apparent but not real rescues: first by Selden in the train station, then by a “rescuing vehicle” that enables her to escape from Rosedale; and a dark fate that pursues her to the end.
In the opening of the second chapter Lily uneasily asks herself: “Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine?” (p. 18). Lily frequently refers to herself as “a girl,” and by doing so suggests her childhood innocence, her undeveloped moral awareness, and her lack of responsibility for her own behavior. Playing high-stakes bridge at Bellomont, Lily loses $300—a very considerable sum, about $3,600 in today’s money—and though she can’t afford it, later gives the same amount to Gerty’s charity. As she wonders whether it’s her fault or her destiny, a poignant flashback describes her family background. Her hardworking but weak, pathetic father “filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks” (p. 32). She seldom saw him during the day, and when he joined his family for summer weekends “he was even more effaced and silent than in winter” (p. 33). Lily’s childhood house, like the house in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1926), seemed “to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money!”23 Mrs. Bart would reproach her husband by asking if he expected her to “live like a pig” (p. 34). In a climactic moment, Mr. Bart tells his daughter to order twelve hundred lilies—and then confesses that he’s ruined. Mrs. Bart, lacking sympathy for her husband’s desperate plight, is furious about what he’s done to them. Lily is merely relieved when he dies.
Lily’s father was either absent or remote; her mother felt only contempt for him. Both taught her to worship wealth and trained her solely for marriage—though she has no real desire to get married. Like Wharton herself, Lily has never had a mother’s love. When the novel opens, Lily, an orphan with no mother to protect her, must look after herself. On Bertha’s yacht in Monte Carlo, Lord Hubert tells Selden that Lily has an aunt in New York, but that New York is a long way off. By then, though Lily doesn’t yet know it, her Aunt Julia Peniston has died, disinherited her, and left her with no place to live. After Gus Trenor’s assault, she seeks refuge with Gerty and sleeps like a baby in a mother’s arms. Just before Lily dies, she imagines herself (for the first and only time) as a mother and with a baby sleeping in her arms.
Lily’s nemesis Bertha Dorset makes a dramatic and domineering entrance on the train to Bellomont: “a pretty woman, who entered the train accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman struggling under a load of bags and dressing-cases. ‘Oh, Lily—are you going to Bellomont? Then you can’t let me have your seat, I suppose? But I must have a seat in this carriage—porter, you must find me a place at once. Can