Wharton Love

--This is Day 3 in "The 7 Last Days of Winter"--

So, House of Mirth and I had a great time together last week. I gave into the urge and wrote all through that book. I wanted to try to express what I thought about it, but I think I could write a graduate thesis on this book, and I don't feel like writing a graduate thesis today. So, here a few, short thoughts, all of which could be expanded heavily through conversation--or a graduate thesis.

Lily Bart:

Lily is the anti-type of heroines in novels about this time period. The heroines in those other novels understand that society is an excuse for actual living, they accept the foibles of society, they look beyond what society tells them is important, and they usually find it. Lily, however, buys into everything that society tells her. I was surprised, initially, that Lily is not an enlightened female, then I started thinking about Archer in Age of Innocence not being truly enlightened either (we can argue about it sometime if you want. I'll win.) and realized Wharton was working her magic once again.

Lily tells of her foolish past, but she does so sincerely. Her father was always to blame since he never brought home enough money; her mother had to spend all of the money the family had on herself and her daughter's appearances, because the correct appearance at one engagement secured the next engagement. When her father goes bankrupt, and her mother dies, Lily is left in the care of an Aunt, who gives Lily enough to live on, but no more. Lily must marry, and she must marry well. And that, my friends, is the goal of the rest of the story. You'd think it would be boring, but it is so unbelievably not.

Types of Power:

One of the themes I tracked throughout the story was the different powers different characters wielded over one another. Each character had a power that had to be refined and used properly to achieve the desired effect; the characters who used their powers ineffectively were, ultimately, the ones who lost.

Lily's power is her beauty and ability to know what society, and more importantly men, expects of her:

"How should she have distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end."

Lily discussing her ability to manipulate situations to show her in the best possible light to attract the best candidate:

 "The system might at first neccessitate a resort to some of the very shifts and expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game her own way."

Lily, having found a man, plotting how long before she wields the full power:

"As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from the way in which his look and tone made free of her, yet telling herself that this momentary endurance of his mood was the price she must pay for her ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate the exact point at which concession must turn to resistance, and the price he would have to pay be made equally clear to him."

I don't have the quote--because it is way too long, but she turns down one candidate because he has knowledge of her being less than what she wants to be perceived as having. He has the power, and she refuses to put herself in a marriage where she isn't seen exactly as she desires.

Men, relations, and Society all have different powers, but let's move on.

Lawrence Selden:

A man comes along--they always do. He is not rich, and he is not titled. He is, instead, a lawyer. He knows her plan/desire/necessity is to marry a rich man, and they discuss that plan. He implies that, having attained her goal, it might not be as fulfilling as she thought. (And this is a conversation, so it doesn't count as a long quote)

"Selden met this appeal with a laugh. 'Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying to get!'
'Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to get them I probably shan't like them?' She drew a deep breath, 'What a miserable future you foresee for me!'
'Well--have you never foreseen it for yourself?'
The slow colour rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.
'Often and often' she said, 'But it looks so much darker when you show it to me.'
He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat silent, while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of the air. But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence.
'Why do you do this to me?' She cried. 'Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me?'

It's an interesting scene because this is the closest Lily gets to admitting that her plan might not be fulfilling. I also thought about the Age of Innocence parallel: the truth being the painful thing (and I'm not referring to that end of the book's truth, but the one at the beginning with Newland where the discussion is about knowledge being painful). Lily admits that she might not end up happy, but her anger is not at herself for wanting the wrong things, but at the person who showed her the shallowness of her wants.

Also, Lily uses the word 'shan't'. Coolest word ever.

If there were time, there would be a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge section on Society, but I decided to skip it. I am, however, going to leave you with one quote that I thought wonderful (Another character, not Lily, says this):

"The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life."

The End:

The end of the book is powerful--more powerful then the beginning--and that's saying a lot. I have no desire to ruin this book for you, so I'll leave you with a final quote. I think it sums up well what she comes to realize. She prepares perfectly for what society expects of her, of what society expected of women at that time, and then, ah yes, then:

"I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?

Exactly. What can one do? What else has she been prepared to do? What other options was she given? What other opportunities were made available? When you take away the one thing that a person has been programmed to do, that they've been promised will fulfill them, that they've been told is the only correct option, that you've expected of them their whole life, when you take it away, what else can one do?

Lily Bart has an answer.