House of Mirth

The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth has been described as one of the two works by female novelists of this period most likely to be considered naturalism, with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening being the other. It’s the story of Lily Bart, a high-society maiden whose family fortune is lost. Lily has a chance for a middle-class existence with the lawyer Lawrence Selden, but Wharton makes it quite clear that Lily is the product of her early environment, in which there was nothing worse to live in a dull apartment and own ugly things, and thus cannot ever marry Lawrence Selden (316). For the same reason, she cannot marry the wealthy Mr. Rosedale, who is not quite in society enough and highly unrefined; she needs both taste and money. She is finally reduced to the point that neither Lawrence nor Rosedale desire to marry her (although Rosedale offers to, if she can regain stature), and lives a pathetic lower-class existence, without any lower-class skills, before accidentally overdosing one sleeping medication – committing suicide (if unintentionally) in true naturalist fashion.

Beyond the obvious connection to naturalism that comes from Wharton declaring that Selden “was, like Lily, the victim of his environment” (160), I’m most interested in the way this novel manages to reduce everything to basic economics. Strangely, Lily is never described as “ruined” in the novel, perhaps because she is never physically “ruined” but only rumored to have been ruined, by virtue of her connection to a married man, Gus Trenor. Her connection to Trenor is of course provable because she borrowed money from him; she is rumored to be ruined sexually because she was ruined financially. Of course, women can’t be ruined financially, as men can; in the case of House of Mirth, Lily’s father: “I’m ruined” he says, when the fortune fails (34). But the family’s fortune isn’t entirely gone until Lily is ruined as well: Lily’s beauty “was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt” (35). This completes the circle. Men are ruined when they lose finances; women are ruined when they have had sex outside of marriage, rendering them no longer eligible to marry men with fortunes. This observation is of course not unique to Wharton – Prince Amerigo, after all, hears in Charlotte’s beauty the chink of gold in The Golden Bowl – but it draws an incredibly clear line between Wharton’s novel and The Rise of Silas Lapham, a line that solidifies Mirth’s status as naturalism. In Lapham, money turns out to be no substitute for taste, and morals rise above both of those; in Mirth, both taste and morals are simply processes by which money makes itself felt – even the possibly immoral and seemingly distasteful Mr. Rosedale is eventually able to transmute his gold into a strong standing in the upper-class community. In The House of Mirth, every interaction is fundamentally revealed to be a financial transaction. The only possible exception is Lily’s union with Lawrence, which she can never bring herself to make, as it is a move full of both morality and taste, but forecloses all paths to future financial success.

On a side note of naturalist import, the novel is full of interesting naturalistic observations – characters are often described as automatons or cogs in a giant machine (54, 324-325). More important is an interesting gender distinction; when Lily is in a more lively (aka Aestheticist) surrounding we get this description: “Little as she wasin the key of their milieu, her immense social facility, her long habit of adapting herself to others without suffering her own outline to be blurred […] had won for her an important place in the Gormer group” (248). The downfall of both Theron Ware and Vandover is that they cannot adapt themselves to those around them without losing their own selves; Lily, I think for purely gender reasons, is allowed that privilege.