Beauty, marriage, and gambling
I’d been meaning to do this for a while but I finally got around to reading my mother’s favorite novel, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The only other Wharton I’d ever read was Ethan Frome in high school, which I hated, and was only willing to give Wharton another shot because Ethan Frome is also my mother’s least favorite novel.
The House of Mirth follows two years in the life of Lily Bart, a beautiful woman from an “old-money” New York family that has run out of said money. Lily is nearly thirty, which, for a class of women who exist entirely for the purpose of getting married, means she is nearing old hag territory, although for now at least she’s still got her looks and her impeccably trained social skills. Being short on money, Lily lives off various friends and relations, although being continually hosted at one person’s mansion or another comes with its own expenses that she can’t really afford, like dressing fashionably and joining in games of bridge.
Lily is a tragic figure in that she has just enough self-respect to want to maintain her integrity, but is too much a creature of her upbringing to deliberately leave “society” and go do something useful with her life, like her plain and independent friend Gerty Farish. As a result, she winds up continually self-sabotaging–making moves towards getting what she wants, and then either actually sabotaging herself, or merely failing to be ruthless enough to defend herself from Bertha Dorset when Dorset sets out to sabotage her. Early in the book we see her trying to “land” the wealthy but boring Percy Gryce, even going so far as to pretend that she goes to church regularly, but then sleeping through church and instead hanging out with Lawrence Selden, a lawyer, and clearly the guy she actually loves although she can’t possibly entertain hi as a marriage prospect because he only makes normal people money and not stupid money. This gives Bertha Dorset time to tell Mr. Gryce that Lily plays bridge, which Gryce disapproves of (and which Lily mainly does because her other friends disapprove of people who don’t), and Gryce promptly fucks off to go marry somebody else. Later, we see Lily reject an offer of marriage from the “new money” Mr. Rosedale, who she personally dislikes for what are frankly quite stupid and prejudiced reasons at the beginning of the book, but whom she sort of comes around on only when it’s too late and she wouldn’t be a useful wife to him anymore. At one point she asks her friend Judy’s husband, Gus Trenor, to help her invest her money better; this turns into a major scandal because Gus just starts giving her money in the hopes that she will become his mistress. Lily is naive enough to think it’s her money for quite a while, and while she eventually turns Gus down, the damage has already been done–word has gotten out that Gus has been paying her bills, and Judy is furious. Lily flees this scandal by going on a cruise with Bertha Dorset, who basically has Lily there to distract her husband while she carries on an affair with an idiot young poet. This eventually blows up and Bertha puts it out that Lily was having an affair with her husband instead. Not everyone actually believes Bertha, but it’s too tough swimming against the social current and too risky to stand up to Bertha. Lily then also gets disinherited by her aunt. Lily has material with which to blackmail Bertha if she wanted to get her reputation back that way, but the material would also implicate Lawrence Selden, so she balks at using it. After a lot of indecision, changing tacks, rejection of help, taking of help and then losing it, moving social circles, getting into arguments, and generally becoming increasingly poor and miserable, Lily finds herself in extremely reduced circumstances–socially isolated, unemployed, dependent upon chloral for chronic insomnia, and awaiting one last payout from her aunt that will be just enough money to cover her debts and bring her net worth back up to zero. She maintains only her integrity, and a fat lot of good it does her.
This novel is, first and foremost, insanely depressing. It’s also one of those books where everyone sort of sucks–there are outright villains like Bertha Dorset, and people who turn out to be not quite as bad as they were introduced as, like Sim Rosedale and Carry Fisher, and people who manage to be correct about one thing or another, like Selden. The only actually nice person in the book is Gerty Farish, who is portrayed–partly through the filter of Lily’s perception, but also just in the novel’s perception, I think–as sort of naive, too trusting, unrefined, and basically sort of un-perceptive in a way that both allows her to suck up living in a shitty little apartment and also not notice what a douchebag everyone else is. In many ways this probably renders Gerty more resilient than our fragile little butterfly of a heroine but it is definitely portrayed as essentially a type of being dumb, and Gerty is more than a little a figure of ridicule in the book. Selden is the one who, to me, is the most relatable, in a way that I’m not sure makes me think well of myself–he’s pretty content to do his thing and hang around the rich weirdos and sort of half be actual friends with them and half observe them like they’re some sort of nature documentary, and he has enough moral sense to judge them but not enough commitment to it to stop going to their parties when invited. Then he goes home to his little comfortable book-filled bachelor pad and has some tea.
Lily is both sympathetic and frustrating. Her little core of what might be pride and what might be self-respect can’t be condemned, I think, but because it’s not paired with any greater rebellious type of strength or any sort of practical skill, all it does is mean she can’t ever quite bring herself to do whatever shitty thing she would need to do to actually get out of her predicaments. The result is that she never gets out of any predicaments, only into new and worse predicaments, and she is also too weak to survive said predicaments, so she just kind of gets blasted into oblivion by having to do anything a normal person does, like a beautiful tropical flower planted outside of its hardiness zone. It’s very tragic, even though she is a thoroughly useless and entitled person. The fact that she’s aware that she’s useless makes it harder to hate her than it is to hate all the other useless people she’s surrounded with, who all seem to remain convinced from beginning to end that they’re all terribly worthy people and that is why God and the stock market have given them all the money.
This book also has quite a lot to say about gender, which I’m sure 120 years of feminist literary critics have discussed more intelligently than I am able to. The one thing that really struck me the most was how well this book illustrates some half-remembered feminist/queer theory kicking around the back of my head about heterosexuality as an organizing principle for people’s entire life, which is why some people cannot just chill the fuck out about non-heterosexuality. Lily is female and, being an upper-class female, her job is to marry. Therefore, literally every single interaction she has with a man in any way, shape, or form, at any time, is analyzed by everyone else through that lens, and getting caught having a single conversation with a guy apparently means marriage is imminent. Meanwhile, snuggling in bed together is apparently just how female friends hang out, even ones that don’t actually like each other very much. It’s like how the most irritating, hormonally addled adolescents thought when I was in school, except that these are entire grown-ass adults with vast amounts of money, and also they can materially ruin people’s lives with their inane comments about “I saw Man Y and Woman X having a conversation in the park, YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE SAY NO MORE SAY NO MORE.” I hate that sort of shit more than just about anything else in the world and if I were Lily I don’t think I would have been able to bring myself to actually marry any of these assholes either.
Anyway, this book is great and I loved it, I just wish that the entire cast of characters had died at the end, except maybe Gerty.
The House of Mirth follows two years in the life of Lily Bart, a beautiful woman from an “old-money” New York family that has run out of said money. Lily is nearly thirty, which, for a class of women who exist entirely for the purpose of getting married, means she is nearing old hag territory, although for now at least she’s still got her looks and her impeccably trained social skills. Being short on money, Lily lives off various friends and relations, although being continually hosted at one person’s mansion or another comes with its own expenses that she can’t really afford, like dressing fashionably and joining in games of bridge.
Lily is a tragic figure in that she has just enough self-respect to want to maintain her integrity, but is too much a creature of her upbringing to deliberately leave “society” and go do something useful with her life, like her plain and independent friend Gerty Farish. As a result, she winds up continually self-sabotaging–making moves towards getting what she wants, and then either actually sabotaging herself, or merely failing to be ruthless enough to defend herself from Bertha Dorset when Dorset sets out to sabotage her. Early in the book we see her trying to “land” the wealthy but boring Percy Gryce, even going so far as to pretend that she goes to church regularly, but then sleeping through church and instead hanging out with Lawrence Selden, a lawyer, and clearly the guy she actually loves although she can’t possibly entertain hi as a marriage prospect because he only makes normal people money and not stupid money. This gives Bertha Dorset time to tell Mr. Gryce that Lily plays bridge, which Gryce disapproves of (and which Lily mainly does because her other friends disapprove of people who don’t), and Gryce promptly fucks off to go marry somebody else. Later, we see Lily reject an offer of marriage from the “new money” Mr. Rosedale, who she personally dislikes for what are frankly quite stupid and prejudiced reasons at the beginning of the book, but whom she sort of comes around on only when it’s too late and she wouldn’t be a useful wife to him anymore. At one point she asks her friend Judy’s husband, Gus Trenor, to help her invest her money better; this turns into a major scandal because Gus just starts giving her money in the hopes that she will become his mistress. Lily is naive enough to think it’s her money for quite a while, and while she eventually turns Gus down, the damage has already been done–word has gotten out that Gus has been paying her bills, and Judy is furious. Lily flees this scandal by going on a cruise with Bertha Dorset, who basically has Lily there to distract her husband while she carries on an affair with an idiot young poet. This eventually blows up and Bertha puts it out that Lily was having an affair with her husband instead. Not everyone actually believes Bertha, but it’s too tough swimming against the social current and too risky to stand up to Bertha. Lily then also gets disinherited by her aunt. Lily has material with which to blackmail Bertha if she wanted to get her reputation back that way, but the material would also implicate Lawrence Selden, so she balks at using it. After a lot of indecision, changing tacks, rejection of help, taking of help and then losing it, moving social circles, getting into arguments, and generally becoming increasingly poor and miserable, Lily finds herself in extremely reduced circumstances–socially isolated, unemployed, dependent upon chloral for chronic insomnia, and awaiting one last payout from her aunt that will be just enough money to cover her debts and bring her net worth back up to zero. She maintains only her integrity, and a fat lot of good it does her.
This novel is, first and foremost, insanely depressing. It’s also one of those books where everyone sort of sucks–there are outright villains like Bertha Dorset, and people who turn out to be not quite as bad as they were introduced as, like Sim Rosedale and Carry Fisher, and people who manage to be correct about one thing or another, like Selden. The only actually nice person in the book is Gerty Farish, who is portrayed–partly through the filter of Lily’s perception, but also just in the novel’s perception, I think–as sort of naive, too trusting, unrefined, and basically sort of un-perceptive in a way that both allows her to suck up living in a shitty little apartment and also not notice what a douchebag everyone else is. In many ways this probably renders Gerty more resilient than our fragile little butterfly of a heroine but it is definitely portrayed as essentially a type of being dumb, and Gerty is more than a little a figure of ridicule in the book. Selden is the one who, to me, is the most relatable, in a way that I’m not sure makes me think well of myself–he’s pretty content to do his thing and hang around the rich weirdos and sort of half be actual friends with them and half observe them like they’re some sort of nature documentary, and he has enough moral sense to judge them but not enough commitment to it to stop going to their parties when invited. Then he goes home to his little comfortable book-filled bachelor pad and has some tea.
Lily is both sympathetic and frustrating. Her little core of what might be pride and what might be self-respect can’t be condemned, I think, but because it’s not paired with any greater rebellious type of strength or any sort of practical skill, all it does is mean she can’t ever quite bring herself to do whatever shitty thing she would need to do to actually get out of her predicaments. The result is that she never gets out of any predicaments, only into new and worse predicaments, and she is also too weak to survive said predicaments, so she just kind of gets blasted into oblivion by having to do anything a normal person does, like a beautiful tropical flower planted outside of its hardiness zone. It’s very tragic, even though she is a thoroughly useless and entitled person. The fact that she’s aware that she’s useless makes it harder to hate her than it is to hate all the other useless people she’s surrounded with, who all seem to remain convinced from beginning to end that they’re all terribly worthy people and that is why God and the stock market have given them all the money.
This book also has quite a lot to say about gender, which I’m sure 120 years of feminist literary critics have discussed more intelligently than I am able to. The one thing that really struck me the most was how well this book illustrates some half-remembered feminist/queer theory kicking around the back of my head about heterosexuality as an organizing principle for people’s entire life, which is why some people cannot just chill the fuck out about non-heterosexuality. Lily is female and, being an upper-class female, her job is to marry. Therefore, literally every single interaction she has with a man in any way, shape, or form, at any time, is analyzed by everyone else through that lens, and getting caught having a single conversation with a guy apparently means marriage is imminent. Meanwhile, snuggling in bed together is apparently just how female friends hang out, even ones that don’t actually like each other very much. It’s like how the most irritating, hormonally addled adolescents thought when I was in school, except that these are entire grown-ass adults with vast amounts of money, and also they can materially ruin people’s lives with their inane comments about “I saw Man Y and Woman X having a conversation in the park, YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE SAY NO MORE SAY NO MORE.” I hate that sort of shit more than just about anything else in the world and if I were Lily I don’t think I would have been able to bring myself to actually marry any of these assholes either.
Anyway, this book is great and I loved it, I just wish that the entire cast of characters had died at the end, except maybe Gerty.