The House of Mirth

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

EDITH JONES WHARTON was born in New York City on January 24, 1862, into a family of merchants, bankers, and lawyers. She was educated privately by tutors and governesses. In 1885 she married Edward Wharton of Boston; the couple lived in New York, Newport, Lenox, and Paris until their divorce in 1913, when Mrs. Wharton settled permanently in Paris. During World War I, Mrs. Wharton was active in relief work in France, and in 1915, she was decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor for her service. Edith Wharton's earliest stories were published in
Scribner's Magazine
, but she did not include these in her first collection of short stories, titled
The Greater Inclination
and published in 1899. Her most famous novels include
The House of Mirth
(1905),
Ethan Frome
(1911), the Pulitzer Prize-winner
The Age of Innocence
(1920),
The Children
(1928),
Hudson River Bracketed
(1929), and
The Gods Arrive
(1932). Mrs. Wharton also wrote, in addition to her novels and short stories, an autobiography,
A Backward Glance
(1934). She died at her villa near Paris in 1937.

 

ANNA QUINDLEN was a longtime columnist for the
New York Times
, and is also the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Object Lessons
,
Black and Blue
,
One True Thing
,
Thinking Out Loud
,
Living Out Loud
, and several books for children.

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INTRODUCTION

Edith Wharton's
The House of Mirth
is a tragedy. There is no getting around this. Dickens ties up the loose threads in his doorstop novels with a bow of reconciliation and good fellowship. Jane Austen's cautionary tales of men, money, and marriage are somewhat unconvincingly resolved with glad domestic arrangements. The coda to
The Great Gatsby
is bittersweet, the inevitable reconciliation of the Buchanans and the studied pathos of the light at the end of that darkened pier. But
The House of Mirth
ends, at least metaphorically, with the sound of a heart breaking. This is sadness, unalloyed.

The depth of this, the extent to which it defines the essence of the novel, has often been overlooked because the book is also a tragedy of manners. It is set in old New York, a fin de sie‘cle city of carriages and castes, intermingled families and unyielding mores, wealth that is gold, not green. New money must sit in its casks for many years to become fit for public consumption. The judgments of the dowagers whose names fill the social register are harsh and irrevocable.

Against this backdrop, so highly detailed, so knowingly rendered, by a woman whose own family tree was thick with the great names of old New York society, unfolds a tale whose tragic trajectory has something of the inexorability of a lame horse racing toward a water jump. Reading
The House of Mirth
, we think not of plot but of fate, so real, so pitiless, and so inevitable does its action seem. The reason why this is so is simply contained in two words: Lily Bart. The most character-driven of novels, this one comes to life instantly as Wharton's bright and beautiful heroine steps forward in its opening scene, “at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine.”

This is how Lawrence Selden, a bachelor from yet another old family, sees her as she hurries toward him in Grand Central Station, adding, “He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make.” From the very beginning of the novel, we understand that its heroine is complex, contradictory—and expensive. As in all great tragedies, the agent of destruction lies within the protagonist's character. These three characteristics will seal Lily's fate.

Lily is on her way to a friend's country house to cement a planned alliance with a horribly dull, hugely wealthy young man, Percy Gryce. At twenty-nine, she has waited too long to make the marriage that is her only vehicle to a safe and comfortable future—in truth, in her set, to any future at all. Despite her charm, her breeding, and her beauty, there is a covert sense in her social milieu that she is a bit dangerous: “his mother was frightened; she was afraid I should have all the family jewels reset,” she says of one beau that got away. Lily is a self-absorbed orphan with expensive tastes and habits, but she is also saddled with an inconvenient mind, mischievous, clever, clear-sighted about the unworthiness of her social ambitions.

And so she proceeds, through a combination of carelessness, casual arrogance, and lack of cunning, to undercut herself at every turn. She takes the trouble to quiz Selden about arcane Americana so that she can make conversation with Percy about his collection of rare and expensive books, then fails to meet the young man for the walk from church that will surely end in an engagement. She bankrupts herself gambling at bridge, takes a large check from her friend Judy's husband, Gus Trenor, who she believes is investing her capital, then thinks herself thrifty when she defers “the purchase of the dressing-case till she should receive the bill for her new opera-cloak.”

When it turns out that Trenor's money was a gift, not a dividend, and with the strings of sex attached, she flees to Europe with Bertha Dorset. But Bertha has invited Lily only to keep her husband, George, happy while she carries on with another man, and when her husband becomes suspicious, she sacrifices Lily on the altar of rumor and innuendo in one of the neatest, meanest twists in fiction.

Even the unaffected young arriviste who needs the well-born Miss Bart to teach her the ways of society cuts Lily off when she sees the chance to embrace a friendship more socially advantageous. And so it goes throughout the novel, one misstep at a time. Lily's descent is gradual, and inevitable: “If she slipped, she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level.” Her friend Mrs. Fisher says sadly, “An Italian Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her; but just at the critical moment a good-looking stepson turned up.” She concludes, as we have, “at heart, she despises the things she's trying for.”

This is a world of airlessness—heavy draperies, tight corsets, closed conservatories—and we can feel Lily gasping for breath, for the fresh air of a venue in which she can do and be what she wishes. The only scene in the novel in which she seems truly happy is, not coincidentally, out of doors, when she and Selden discuss the “republic of the spirit,” a life of personal freedom that he thoughtlessly holds up as an ideal, blind to the fact that a woman of Lily's class and situation can only support herself through marriage. This social claustrophobia is an atmosphere, and a feeling that Wharton knew well. Like Lily she came from an amalgam of old New York families—the Schermerhorns, Stevens, and Rhinelanders—whose names made the eyes of new money pretenders glow. She was born Edith Jones, and her father's family was said to be responsible for the idiomatic expression “keeping up with the Joneses.” But the atmosphere of endless comfort was illusory; like Lily, she made a “dazzling début fringed by a heavy thunder-cloud of bills” and decamped for a tour of Europe when money troubles loomed.

She made the proper marriage that polite society decreed, to a somewhat dim young man from a respectable family with a streak of mental illness. And from Teddy Wharton, she learned what Lily feels so powerfully: that this sort of life is empty, unworthy, not enough. Edith found her real place outside society and outside her marriage, in her work as a poet, short story writer, and finally, a novelist.

As a novel
The House of Mirth
has it both ways, disapproving of the mores of the very rich and yet portraying them as invincible, often correct. In her life, Edith Wharton had it both ways, too: Park Avenue and Bohemia, calling cards and magazine articles. Unlike George Sand and George Eliot, the two female writers with men's names whom she admired, she did not establish an unconventional menage. She wrote in and of the world Lily Bart inhabits, lying in bed, writing in long-hand on the second sheets of her engraved stationery, leaving the detritus about to be tidied up by the maids.

Her finest novel also happened to be her first.
The House of Mirth
was serialized in eleven issues of
Scribner's
magazine in 1905 and by the end of the year the author had occasion to make this note in her diary: “H. of M. best-selling book in New York.” While she had a comfortable inheritance upon which to live, very soon most of her income came from her writing. Would that Lily had had such an alternative to marrying well.

Yet Wharton felt some of the same constraints that her heroine did, felt that she could scarcely breathe in her marriage, or among the remnants of the old New York society of which her family had been a part. She spent most of her later life as an expatriate in Europe, and divorced Teddy Wharton after a troubled marriage of twenty-eight years. Some of the bitter fruits of that union can be found between the lines of her novels. They are devoid of children, as was the Whartons' marriage, and of sex, as the Wharton marriage, perhaps because of Edith's childlessness, was rumored to be; it is clear that the one mistake Lily Bart will not make is to surrender her chastity, and that part of her allure is an essential untouchability. (The one scene in
The House of Mirth
in which there is a strong sexual element, the one in which Gus Trenor seems ready to force himself on Lily, is a scene of violence, not of Eros.) Some of Wharton's distress is found overtly in her personal writings. In her diary she described a moment that could well have been part of one of her novels: handing her husband an interesting passage in a book on evolution, watching him read, hearing him say lightly, “Does that sort of thing really amuse you?” Later she would put down her deepest feelings in French:
“Ici, j'etouffe.”
Here, I am suffocating.