Beauty and dinginess, beauty and the beast, depend upon each other. Dinginess isn’t brilliant, sublime, perfect, but dirty, tainted, dark, discolored, worn, or spoiled, used and disgusting. (The word “dingy” may come from the word “dinghy,” a small boat or vessel that sails by the side of larger vessels.) Lily’s mother instills the terror of it in her. Mrs. Bart’s greatest “reproach” to her husband is that he expected her to become dingy or “live like a pig” (I, 3, 26), one of Freud’s animals. (Anality comes to mind.) Treated with indifference and contempt, Mr. Bart’s a cash machine to his wife and to Lily, who has more sympathy for him. After he loses his money, his failure and inadequacy in Mrs. Bart’s eyes are made complete when he dies and leaves them poor, ruined.
After two years of hungry roaming, Mrs. Bart had died—of a deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year. (I, 3, 30)
To Miss Bart, as to her mother, acquiescence in dinginess was evidence of stupidity; and there were moments when, in the consciousness of her own power to look and be so exactly what the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were plain and inferior from choice. (I, 8, 70)
Mrs. Peniston’s opulent interior was at least not externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality that assumes all manner of disguises; and Lily soon found it was as latent in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift existence of a continental pension. (I, 3, 31)
Dinginess isn’t ever simple wear and tear. Contrasted again and again to brilliance, light, the sun, glow (as if Wharton were a Manichee), the dark and dirty that Lily fears and names dinginess emanates from what she doesn’t know and can’t see. There’s no clarity, no bright light by which to see these appalling, unconscious forces that threaten her every step. Stupidity, as dullness, is also dinginess (though for her to shine too brilliantly could attract unwanted attention and failure). But Lily is stupid before the irrational. Wharton knew everyone was.
In an extraordinary passage, Lily worries that Mrs. Peniston (“To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor” [I, 3, 32]) has been “too passive,” has not helped her enough socially; but Lily also fears she herself has “not been passive enough” and too “eager” (I, 3, 33).
Younger and plainer girls had been married off by the dozens, and she was nine and twenty and still Miss Bart.
She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself but what manner of life would it be? . . . She was too intelligent not to be honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again against its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch. (I, 3, 33)
She fights against being ruined. It’s a struggle to the death that she loses, one beyond her control, fought blindly, unconsciously. For a smart girl, Lily often acts impulsively and against her interests. But Wharton sometimes confounds the reader who is attempting to decide what is in her interest. Maybe nothing is. Even if Lily knew what her interests were, she might not be able to stop herself or control herself, for reasons she cannot know.
***
The question persists: If plainer and stupider girls could marry, why can’t Lily? Marriage’s promise is not just economic and social partnership, but also sexual union. Terror of sex and sexuality, of being made dingy, may be a piece of Lily’s unmarriageability, inscribed in her body as attenuated virginity. Intent upon weaving surface and foundation, Wharton lets Lily’s body and interior speak society’s prohibitive customs and conventions.
(Imagining a character’s psychology can be as “slippery” as the “bright pinnacles of success” Lily can’t reach. But Wharton looks hard at Lily, as a condition, as a symptom of social injustice, restriction, inhibition, repression, oppression, as an unstable object in an uncertain structure. She scrutinizes her with a kind of clinical neutrality.
The chief difference between the merely sympathetic and the creative imagination is that the latter is two-sided, and combines with the power of penetrating into other minds that of standing far enough aloof from them to see beyond, and relate them to the whole stuff of life out of which they partially emerge. Such an all-round view can be obtained only by mounting to a height; and that height, in art, is proportioned to the artist’s power of detaching one part of his imagination from the particular problem in which the rest is steeped. (Writing, 15)
Her very sharp pen, held high, is dipped in the ink of ambivalence—fascination, contempt, compassion, anger, fear. Like all writers, Wharton works as much from what she knows as from what she doesn’t. The unconscious presents mysteries and allows pleasures, pains and pathologies a visibility that one can’t plan or control.)
Lily’s unlovableness and sense of unworthiness is disguised by her beautiful, impenetrable exterior. She’s valued for it alone.
One thought consoled [Mrs. Bart], and that was the contemplation of Lily’s beauty . . . it was the last asset in their fortunes . . . She watched it jealously as if it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian . . . (I, 3, 29)
The dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the existence to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated intelligence Mrs. Bart’s counsels might have been dangerous, but Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to convert it into success other arts are required. She knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of the stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features. (I, 3, 30)
Lily can’t manipulate what’s inside her, her feelings about who she is or isn’t. Her beauty is unassailable and absolute; no one touches it—or her. But its scale triggers alarms, calls too much attention upon her and maybe isn’t a good enough cover story. She manages it, like her intelligence, though it’s inconvenient and ill-fitting—“more conspicuous than a ballroom.” Lily’s “passion for the appropriate” (I, 6, 51) may be oxymoronic.
***
In The Decoration of Houses, Wharton claims that “structure conditions ornament, not ornament structure” (Decoration, 14). Lily’s an ornament that can be betrayed, deformed, in the wrong setting. Her beauty will turn ugly if nothing else around it, or within her, supports it, makes it function or harmonize with the structure that conditions it. Inappropriate and out of context, beauty can be empty, a thing, nothing but a facade, a fake. When Selden thinks he “see[s] before him the real Lily Bart,” she is a tableau vivant, an image, “Mrs. Lloyd” of the Reynolds painting (I, 12, 106). He suddenly perceives her “divested of the trivialities of her little world and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part” (I, 12, 106).
It’s a singular moment. Lily blends in, in the right setting, and is embraced by Selden for her perfection. Selden’s revelry is shattered, though, when Ned Van Alstyne trivializes her, and he becomes indignant.
This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda? (I, 12, 107)
He’s sympathetic to her; but she’s an idealized image. Wharton extols her beauty in this highly artificial, artful scene. She freezes Lily and portrays her as a living picture, so there’s something grotesque about it, and about her, too. She’s not quite human. But Selden, an aesthete, can adore her and suspend his harsh judgment of her. He can almost love her.
Selden’s no less harsh about her, and society, than she is. There’s dogged reason in Wharton’s pairing of these cool characters, each of whom mirrors the other’s desires and lacks. The differences between them elucidate differences based on sex, bu
t through them, Wharton plays with balancing the unbalanced sexes.
If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small group of the like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and was not insensible to the part money plays in their production. All he asked was that the very rich live up to their calling as stage managers, and not spend their money in a dull way. (I, 12, 103-4)
Like Lily, Selden isn’t rich, but unlike her he works for a living. Like Lily, he abjures dullness, appreciates beauty and the finer things, has a pronounced and cultivated sensibility, and recognizes and is repulsed by vulgarity. He feels above most people; he wants to avoid being bored. His lack of chastity isn’t, of course, an obstacle. Lily often talks with him about her chances for marriage. But she rarely thinks about or mentions love. (When Lily loves and thrills, it is to rooms and places. Her sensitivity to a room and decoration is as excessive as her beauty.) One of the times she considers love is when she thinks about Selden.
(Lily) could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dullness she had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings. She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man . . . If Lily recalled this early emotion it was not to compare it with that which now possessed her; the only point of comparison was the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered feeling . . . that glow of freedom; but now it was something more than blind groping of the blood. (I, 6, 52)
Earlier in the scene, Lily wails for Selden to come to her, surrounded by nature, with which she “had no real intimacy” (I, 6, 51). Nature is another one of The House of Mirth’s uneasier foundations. What is woman’s nature? With freedom, will Lily Bart be “womanly,” capable of giving herself in marriage, having babies and conforming to social obligations? Or will she become too new, unusable?
She’s been “in love with fortunes and careers, but only once with a man.” Nature and love aren’t natural to Lily, and she doesn’t conform to feminine proscriptions that link women with nature, women with love. Lily thinks she knows Selden’s nature, since it’s like hers. His “air of friendly aloofness . . . [is] . . . the quality which piqued Lily’s interest” (I, 6, 53). Selden’s aloofness sets Lily up, off and down. She doesn’t know what to expect from him, never knows if he loves her or might be serious about marrying her.
Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met. (I, 6, 53)
She admires him for an irony that keeps him at a distance. Like her his passions are oxymoronically reserved for the appropriate. Wharton’s odd couple are dedicated to controlling themselves. But love jeopardizes control; forces one to become involuntarily subject to another, even lost in the other. Selden’s suspicious of losing himself, and he’s so suspicious of Lily he thinks that “even her weeping was an art.” (I, 6, 58)
That which he projects ahead of him as his ideal is merely his substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood—the time when he was his own ideal.5
When Selden thought he saw the real Lily Bart, she was a living doll. Maybe he loved her most then as a lost part of himself, the illusory ideal he once imagined himself to be or have. They’re both difficult characters, wary of love, looking for perfection. Not finding it in themselves or others, they don’t lose themselves.
In a recent TV advertisement for a men’s perfume called Contradiction, a young man declares, “I don’t want her to need me. I want her to desire me. Need isn’t desire.” Lily needs Selden more than she desires him; Selden’s idea of freedom entails being wanted, not needed. Their attraction to each other is unstable and compelling, living, dying, again and again. The contradictory logic that might make them lovers—both are ambivalent, both want freedom—is precisely what makes them unfit for each other.
***
In this thwarted romance, star-crossed lovers want to love but can’t, do in some ways love themselves and each other, but also share in self-loathing, an effect, too, of narcissism. Freud wrote that loving oneself is not a “perversion but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature” (“Narcissism,” 105). Selden’s self-regard appears less compromised than Lily’s; she worries too much about becoming clingy. But both suffer from narcissistic wounds and lick them throughout the novel, sparing themselves the pain of further injury.
The effect of the dependence upon the love object is to lower that feeling [of self-regard]: the lover is humble. He who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, which can only be replaced by his being loved. (“Narcissism,” 120)
There is, in the act of love, a great resemblance to torture or to a surgical operation.6
Selden and Lily never stop preserving and defending themselves from imagined or real injuries and threats. Love—relinquishment of control—might be torture for them. When Lily visits Selden for the last time, she is finally able to articulate it.
Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. But the moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living. Goodbye. (II, 12, 241)
Love’s dead, but “something lived between them also. . . . it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his” (II, 12, 241). Her idea of love colludes with Wharton’s understanding of desire that arises from the desire to be desired. Even more abstractly, Lily understands that “she could not go forth and leave her old self with him; that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it must still continue to be hers” (II, 12, 241). Even when love is dead, no longer capable of causing pain, surgery—amputation—won’t be allowed. Lily’s fear of losing herself, giving herself up to him, certainly may be her magnificent desire to be herself. But what Wharton suggests is that her impassioned need to preserve herself at all costs may be an implacable obstacle to happiness; for it she will pay the ultimate price.
***
Not coincidentally, the most exquisite or maybe the only love scene in The House of Mirth is not between Selden and Lily, but between mother and child—with Lily playing the mother and becoming the child in a kind of self-love scene. (It’s also the only scene in which one character holds another with passion or for any length of time.) After the devastating last meeting with Selden, Lily bumps into Nettie Crane Struthers, one of Gerty Farish’s “girls,” on the street.
Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and energy; whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be cast into the refuse heap without a struggle. (II, 13, 243)
Though poor, Nettie’s not rubbish, not dingy. Nettie invites Lily home: “it’s real warm in our kitchen” (II, 13, 244). In another of Wharton’s relatively few underscorings and repetitions, she italicizes “was” in Lily’s repeated thought: “It was warm in the kitchen” (II, 13, 244). (Warm or warmth occurs several more times in this hearth-and-home kitchen scene.) Nettie’s life, though different from Lily’s, has its similarities. She was about to give up, having been jilted, but unlike Lily, Nettie found a man, George, married, and had a baby. Nettie’s reputation doesn’t stop George from marrying her; Lily’s stops everyone. Nettie’s success as a traditional woman, playing traditional roles, is severely contrasted to Lily’s failures, her flawed femininity and fatal unmarriageability. This extreme pairing, before Lily’s suicide
, seems to enunciate the author’s ambivalence toward Lily and the allure and demands of femininity. And maybe it also addresses Wharton’s own maternal deprivation, since through the veil of fiction one writes what one wants as much as what one doesn’t.
When Lily holds Nettie’s baby, at first the child
seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the child entered into her and became a part of herself. (II, 13, 245-6)
Wharton fashions another tableau vivant, a Madonna and Child (by Bellini, let’s say), and paints the badly mothered Lily Bart into it. In a moment of devastating psychological revelation, Lily is transformed as the infant enters her. The baby becomes a lost part of her, an adult still so little, so undeveloped, she’s as weak as a baby, or she is the baby.
[Nettie:] “Wouldn’t it be too lovely if she grew up to be just like you?” [Lily:] “Oh she must not do that—I should be afraid to come to see her too often.” (II, 13, 246)
Now Wharton’s gone Gothic again, writing a ghost story. Lily foresees her death, and, as a ghost, could return to visit the real Lily Bart, who has never actually existed. The baby could become the person she might have been, had she been loved and able to thrive. At Nettie’s warm hearth, Lily’s heartless mother is a spectral presence, with Lily’s pathetic, beaten-down father hovering in the corner where her mother placed him. (What kind of man could Lily love after him? Or, even, could Lily really love a man after him?)
***
One may distinguish the novel of situation from that of character and manners by saying that, in the first, the persons imagined by the author almost always spring out of a vision of the situation, and are inevitably conditioned by it, whatever the genius of their creator; whereas in the larger freer form, that of character and manners (or either of the two), the author’s characters are first born, and then mysteriously proceed to work out their destinies. (Writing, 89)
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 23