***
Wharton’s enclosures house conflicts and conflicted characters, created not just by ordinary walls. The author constructs walls, limits, that are both real and metaphorical. Wharton’s central and most sustained trope, architecture always alludes to Lily’s physical or mental space, her environment or psychological condition. The decor—couches, paintings, fireplaces, bric-a-brac—becomes evidence of the state in which she exists or of the character of the characters she meets.
[Mrs Dorset] could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. . . . she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room. (I, 2, 21-2)
There was nothing new to Lily in these tokens of a studied luxury; but though they formed a part of her atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to their charm. Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction, but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth. (I, 4, 34)
Look at a boy like Ned Silverton—he’s really too good to be used to refurbish anybody’s social shabbiness. (I, 6, 56-7)
The exterior suggests the interior or, rather, is the manifestation, the visible order, of an inner world.
Since architecture also defines space by what is not built and what lies outside, the trope allows Wharton to delineate the unbounded, permeable relationship between outside and inside, the flow and inevitable transmission between the so-called inner life and outer life. Lily contends with the limits of public life and space, with propriety and sensibility, with street life, the places without walls that are bounded and limited, to women.
All good architecture and good decoration (which it must never be forgotten is only interior architecture) must be based on rhythm and logic. (Decoration, 13)
For Lily Bart, leaving rooms and being on the street is hazardous; it’s when many of her most devastating and decisive encounters occur. Leaving Selden’s apartment, she accidentally meets Mr. Rosedale in front of the Benedick (bachelor) Apartments. She tells a lie that propels the novel’s story—and her undoing—into motion. Lily instantly realizes her error. (Rosedale’s appearance has been foreshadowed by an unkempt charwoman on the Benedick stairs, who unsettles Lily and with whom Lily compares herself. The charwoman also returns to plague her, blackmail her.)
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? (I, 2, 19)
Her comings and goings are not easy; she doesn’t make smooth exits; and there are certainly no escapes.
Ironically, Lily identifies with the man who can undo her, Simon Rosedale, a noveau riche Jewish businessman initially sketched by Wharton with the brush of conventional anti-Semitism. He is, like Lily, “a novelty” (I, 2, 16). She “understood his motives, for her own course was guided by nice calculations” (I, 2, 16). Within a very few pages, Wharton serves up two male characters, dissimilar to each other and to her, as well as a dissimilar female, against whom to judge Lily. All balance our view of her, creating a kind of symmetry or the rhythm and logic fundamental to Wharton’s idea of design in architecture and fiction.
Later in the novel, “as [Selden and Van Alstyne] walked down Fifth Avenue [to Mrs. Fisher’s] the new architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited Van Alstyne’s comments” (I, 14, 126). (Wharton may be commenting upon her techniques for outlining the “redundant” manners and modes she must contend with in society and in constructing, “corseting,” her fictions.) Then Van Alstyne remarks about Mrs. Bry’s architect:
What a clever chap . . . how he takes his client’s measure! (1, 14, 126)
Architecture, to Wharton’s thinking, can reveal the whole of a character. When Van Alstyne and Selden reach the Trenor house, Van Alstyne reports it’s empty and remarks offhandedly that Mrs. Trenor is away.
The house loomed obscure and uninhabited, only an oblong gleam above the door spoke of provisional occupancy. (I, 14, 127)
At this moment, whose consequences also loom obscure, Lily is discovered in the doorway with Gus Trenor. She has just fought him off and is leaving. Her provisional presence, not inside, not outside, endangers her. Compromised, in the wrong place at the wrong time, seen by Selden, whose heart has recently turned more decisively toward her, and by her relative, Van Alstyne, her fortune is immediately reversed. But her name is never used; she has entered the realm of the unspeakable.
Wharton deploys a discourse on houses, about how an architect (maker/writer) can expose the character of the persons whose house he designs, to position Lily. When she appears in a place where she should not be, her presence there says something about her. Though this was not her design, many of the things Lily does are designed, and many that appear designing and manipulative are not. Ineluctably, Lily becomes ensnared in patterns not of her making that are not provisional enough.
***
To conform to a style, then, is to accept those rules of proportion which the artistic experience of centuries has established as the best, while within those limits allowing free scope to the individual requirements which must inevitably modify every house or room adapted to the use and convenience of its occupants. (Decoration, 15)
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. (Writing, 17)2
The distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal—both symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundance—are in truth leading to pure anarchy in fiction. (Writing, 15)
In The Decoration of Houses (1897) and The Writing of Fiction (1924), Wharton argues for conformity to style and tradition against originality for its own sake. The rhythm and logic of the past must be observed or at least taken into account and regarded, if not entirely followed. Wharton even claims that stream of consciousness and slice of life are the same idea; stream of consciousness is slice of life “relabeled” (Writing, 12). Her aesthetics and views on morality and convention form the underlying arguments in the novel and contain within them the seeds of conflict planted and harvested in Lily Bart.
Enshrined in Lily is a contest between new and old, tradition, innovation and the hazards of change. On the first page of the novel, Wharton efficiently marks her territory when Selden thinks to himself: “There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest” (I, 1, 5). To him she was so “radiant” she was “more conspicuous than a ballroom” (I, 1, 5). (The scale is striking, so disproportionate.) But not bold enough or too principled to marry for money and live any way she chooses, she cannot strike out on her own and exist on her meager income, like Gerty Farish. She is not a new woman. Wharton does not allow her a wholly new manner, which the author disdains, but she also does not provide Lily with vision for a new life.
(Lily is more like a new woman manqué. It’s as if Wharton invented her to put on trial and test her principle of “conform[ing] to a style . . . [that] artistic experience of centuries has established as the best, while within those limits allowing free scope to the individual requirements.” How one holds to tradition and style and discovers within them “free scope” is at the crux of Wharton’s contradictory, ongoing argument with the modernists and the social order.)
Lily contains within her traces and pieces of the old order and longings for the new. Wharton drops Lily between the two worlds, on the frontier, where no place is home or safe. Habitually, Lily pays the price for not being able to realize a new way and for needing the largesse of others whom she despises or for whom she has contempt.
That cheap originality which finds expression in putting things to uses for which they were not intended is often confounded with individuality. Whereas the latter consists not in an attempt to be different from other people at the cost of comfort, but in the desire to be comfortable in one’s own way, even though it be the way of a monotonously large majority. It seems easier to most people to arrange a room like someone else’s than to analyze and express their own needs. (Decorat
ion, 19-20)
Lily’s difference from the “monotonously large majority” hangs her on a cross constructed from an opposition between novelty and individuality. She feels superior and wants to discover and “express [her] own needs,” as Selden does. She must find a way to “use” herself, not as a “cheap experiment” but in the intended way. But there is no intended way, not for her.
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Men, in these matters, are less exacting than women, because their demands, besides being simpler, are uncomplicated by the feminine tendency to want things because other people have them, rather than to have things because they are wanted. But it must never be forgotten that everyone is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others.
. . . The unsatisfactory relations of some people with their rooms are often to be explained in this way. They have still in their blood the traditional uses to which these rooms were put in times quite different from the present. . . . To go to the opposite extreme and discard things because they are old-fashioned is equally unreasonable. (Decoration, 19-20)
Desire is a strange brew, Wharton knew, concocted of the desires of others. Her psychological acumen suffuses The House of Mirth, in which Lily is “unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others.” Lily has “in her blood” the uses for which she was made but is unwilling to go to “the opposite extreme” and “discard things” because they are “old-fashioned.”
Once more the haunting sense of physical ugliness was intensified by her mental depression, so that each piece of the offending furniture seemed to thrust forth its most aggressive angle. (I, 9, 86)
Lily does want to get rid of ugly things. The effects of physical ugliness—disproportion—and mental depression intermingle in her. Their symmetry or dissymmetry serves Wharton’s notion of the interior as inextricable from the exterior. Lily’s internal conflicts are displayed in the outer world, where she is a beautiful but tormented trophy in its display case. Her inner struggles show themselves as much by what she does not do as by what she does.
It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the Ashman. If I could only do over my aunt’s drawing room I know I should be a better woman. (I, 1, 8)
Lily’s longing to clean out her aunt’s room is a wish to change herself, to throw out her own horrors. In a better room, she might become better—setting and place affect character. But Lily can’t throw out the horrors, she cannot change the conditions in which she lives that have made her the kind of woman she is. When she strikes out against convention or her interests, by spending time with Selden and avoiding her rich, boring suitor, Percy Gryce, her revolt takes the shape of inaction, temporizing. She may want to remove horrors but she does not act or cannot. Cleaning her aunt’s room of horrors could also be another clever reference to the Gothic, but from the Gothic, which preceded Freud, with its insistence on the darkness in human beings and the cauldron of murky, unconscious desires that drive behavior, other ideas march in. They enter through a side door—call it the unarticulated or the unconscious—of Wharton’s subtle fiction.
***
. . . she was not meant for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury, it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in. But the luxury of others was not what she wanted.
. . . Now she was beginning to chafe at the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the splendor which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way. (I, 3, 23)
Lily pays by being charming and by trying to keep her reputation intact. A twentieth-century Clarissa, who even fights off a rape, Lily’s chastity is a series of questions. Purity? Property? Repression? Inhibition? Architecture is, among other things, about bodies living within structures built for bodies by bodies. Lily is subject, even prey, to assaults within two kinds of structures—external or social and internal or psychological. The exterior holds, conditions and is manifested in the interior, interiority inhabited and penetrated by the social. (If houses and ornaments are mated, psychologies are married to societies.)
She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston’s—its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers. To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere. (I, 15, 118)
She had tried to mitigate this charmless background by a few frivolous touches . . . but the futility of the attempt struck her as she looked about the room What a contrast to the subtle elegance of the setting she had pictured for herself—an apartment which should surpass the complicated luxury of her friends’ surroundings by the whole extent of that artistic sensibility which made herself feel their superior. (I, 9, 86)
Lily wants her accommodations to fit her sense of superiority. But they usually don’t. She may even want a house or room, with its “almost human arms,” more than a man and marriage, a desire for which society traditionally punishes women. Living at her aunt’s, Mrs. Peniston—penal, penurious, penis—Lily must sleep and dream in a bedroom that’s “as dreary as a prison” (I, 9, 86). Since Wharton’s prisons are real spaces and metaphors, Lily’s mind and body are trapped not only in dreary rooms but also in the society whose customs shape her.
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The survival of obsolete customs in architecture, which makes the study of sociology so interesting, has its parallel in the history of architecture. (Decoration, 5)
Excremental things are all too intimately and inseparably bound up with sexual things . . .The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty; they have retained their animal cast; and so even today love, too, is in essence as animal as it ever was.3
Sigmund Freud and Edith Wharton were contemporaries. They lived during approximately the same years, Freud from 1856 to 1939, Wharton 1866 to 1937. Freud was as interested in archeology as Wharton was in architecture; it was foundational for his thought. He mined it for metaphors and used it as analogues to human psychology. Wharton obviously had an interest in psychology, though it’s unlikely she read Freud. She was aware of him as every educated person would have been then, and wrote in a letter to Bernard Berenson, “Please ask Mary not to befuddle her with Freudianism and all its jargon”4 Though she eschewed Freud’s “jargon,” Wharton understood the terms, the ground on which she built her characters. Wharton had a sophisticated understanding of psychology, and her treatment and development of Lily Bart shows her exploring some issues that Freud did. Differently, of course.
Beneath the customs of society lie what the Gothic, and ghost stories, point to: human anxieties and fears, needs and motives drive by desires and instincts not governable by reason. The vicissitudes of sex and sexuality, duty and morality, wreak havoc on Wharton’s characters, whether in this novel, The Age of Innocence, or Madame de Treymes. Wharton is the poet of oppression and repression, and attending to her project, she presents Lily with obstacles. Freud might call them neuroses. Whatever one calls them, “things” are in the way of Lily Bart’s ability to thrive.
The preciousness of Lily’s reputation reflects the irrational foundations of her world. Taboos about virginity mark both so-called primitive and civilized societies. They mask, Freud theorized, universal human fears about female sexuality and sexuality itself. Wharton’s female characters dwell and flail about in a troubled, transitional period (a very long moment that continues to the present). Like Freud, Wharton was nurtured in a Victorian culture and then lived on into a newer, modern world. Like him, she studied the psychological effects on people resistant to, and transformed by, great cultural and social changes. (In The Mother’s Recompense, the mother flees her marriage, abandons her young daughter for her lover. Years later, the daughter whom she hasn’t seen since she ran away, will become e
ngaged to that same man. It’s a cautionary Oedipal tale about what can happen if women chase after their desires. When the social order is overturned, duty and obligation ignored for siren freedom, Wharton intimates, incest is a possibility.)
Seated under the cheerless blaze of the drawing room chandelier—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was “company”—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dullness to a middle-age like Grace Stepney’s. (I, 9, 80)
Inside this narrow world of prohibition and inhibition, Lily’s possibilities are limited. If Selden embodies Lily’s hopes, her Utopian vision, Grace Stepney personifies her fears of the nightmarish future—poverty, spinsterhood, social ugliness. The fear of turning into Grace alarms Lily as much as Selden’s freedom entices her.
Ah, there’s the difference—a girl must, a man may if he chooses . . . Your coat’s a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as herself. . . Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership. (I, 1, 12)
***
The social constraints for women are as clear as the crystal in the houses Wharton describes. But she proposes less obvious or visible constraints. Rarely insistent or repetitive, she is both about Lily’s beauty and her terror of dinginess. (Two sides of the same coin, they may constitute her fatal flaw.) Lily’s dread—“who wants a dingy woman?”—renders her incapable of happiness, even of living within her means. Even if one supposes one understands how Lily’s beauty works—as surface or appearance, as a manifestation of the sublime, as her difference from others, as artistic perfection and imperfection (the human golden bowl)—dinginess is still trickier, more obscure and difficult to grasp. But both refer to the liminal, mostly unseen relationship between interiors and exteriors.
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 22
