The House of Mirth: A Reappraisal

Decades after blowing off Wharton's greatest work for an undergrad lit. class—like any self-respecting middle-class New York maIe—I finally successfully tackle this classic.

What to make of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, a book whose mores and social milieu are so steeped in the—although published in 1905—late 19nth Century Gilded Age of upper crust Manhattan that it appears almost other worldly to a reader today? I certainly did not cotton to this book when it was assigned in an undergraduate literature course back in the mid-80’s. I gave up in enraged frustration perhaps fifty pages in and was forced—much to my chagrin—to parrot class notes during an essay final when I had no choice, but to pontificate over Miss Lily Bart, the heroine whose downfall is preordained and “tragic” in the classical sense of the term—at least that was my professor’s take. From what I gleaned in the lectures, Miss Lily Bart was outwardly annoying, at least to a straight white middle-class male New Yorker raised in a Manhattan housing project on the same street, 23rd, albeit the east end of it, on which Edith Wharton was born into extreme wealth and status.

Perhaps The House of Mirth stands along with Little Women as the perfect example of a novel over which women swoon and straight men perplexingly scratch their heads in stifling befuddlement. My “reread” of this American classic was hastened by a recent avowal to read Edith Wharton’s great works along with my partner, Alison, who as a woman, has an ability to grasp the nuance, social niceties, and viciousness of Wharton’s descriptions, the subtler of which might still evade my male-marred powers of perception. I had to experience The House of Mirth in small doses so Wharton’s precise snarky prose could be properly relished.

Given that I am now mature and approaching sixty, I was better able to comprehend and empathize with Lily Bart and her awful plight this time round; however, fighting my way through this book was like trying to ascend a hill with a steep gradient in a torrential rainstorm that renders the path a muddy stream, without walking sticks; walking sticks being a metaphor for the experience of coming of age as a female and having dealt with subtle female on female machinations for decades.

She did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she though Lily disliked her. It was less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness. (Pg. 187)

The tragic ending is foreordained and certainly foreshadowed throughout most of the book. The male characters are largely dullards blissfully unaware of their own privilege and dubious behavior. The females are acutely class-conscious and, often, don’t comprehend arithmetic* and whose goal in life is to marry well, i.e. wealthily and for status in order to retain or gain power. Love is not a factor in this simple matrimonial equation where the Gilded Age, at least as far as women are concerned, is a gilded cage.

Edith Wharton wields a poisoned pen in her scathing portrayal of wealth and status in old New York. The novel’s villain, Bertha Dorset—who eclipses the mere petty bitchiness of most of the other female characters in the work—and her at least thrice cuckolded pusillanimous spouse, are as odious as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy, characters who would only appear two decades later, and who are now synonymous with couples who blithely create carnage and suffer nary a scratch due to their carapace of obscene wealth.

As with Fitzgerald’s work, The House of Mirth is also mired in the prejudices of the era in which it was written. One of the more likeable characters—at least from today’s perspective—is the parvenu Jew, Rosedale, whose advances are initially and repeatedly spurned by Lily Bart. Rosedale doesn’t have human molar cufflinks, only an understandable crush on Miss Bart, the supremely attractive gentile who might help him gain admittance to New York’s aristocracy.

Libido and sexuality are conspicuous in their absence throughout the novel. By 1905, Freud’s theories were slowly becoming the rage; in fact, Three Essays on Sexuality was published the same year as The House of Mirth. Despite the gradual acknowledgement of libido driving human motives, Lily Bart is as a 29-year-old virgin whose main concern is marrying correctly. Sexual attraction plays no part in her decisions. She constantly scrutinizes her own visage for signs of a wrinkle or blemish in any available mirror (there are many). She finds fault with all the potential suitors. The reader empathizes with Miss Bart’s predicament because the suitors are presented by Wharton as either frightfully dull and suitably wealthy, or more interesting intellectually but merely affluent (or, as in the case of Rosedale, unfortunately Jewish new money).

A perusal of the female characters in The House of Mirth leads one to intuit that the only women free to have sexual intercourse are the married women, and only if the husband turns a blind eye to the infidelity. Gilded Age society women will unleash their libidos, but almost exclusively on men other than their husbands who are mere accoutrements, present only to provide a scion or two and to sign checks for fancy dresses and balls as they grow increasingly stout and dyspeptic while obliviously carping about how hard it is to earn a living. The Gilded Age society does not grant the single woman of birth status any legitimate release of her libido other than to preen and wear a nice outfit that will be raved over in the society columns. Thus, the fate of the heroine is virtually sealed from the early chapters of the book.

Miss Bart is too discerning and intellectually adventurous to assent to the proposal of a mere dullard of affluent means, and too well-aware of her precarious place in the Gilded Age hierarchy to agree to matrimony with more empathetic men who are merely economically comfortable. Discerning readers will ascertain where Miss Bart is heading very early in the novel. It just takes over 500 pages (at least in the original edition) for Miss Bart to fulfill her tragic destiny in all its sublime beauty.

---------------------

*. . .but her mind shrank from any unusual application, and she was always helplessly puzzled by figures. (Pg. 186).