The House of Mirth: Sustained Denial

The House of Mirth is one of my favourite books and a cautionary tale as relevant now as it was then, to how easy one can cultivate an unlived life.


Wharton's wrote a chillingly stunning book about the vanity of human wishes and the damage a superficial culture can inflict on those who do not know how to play by its rules, or who play by the rules in a manner too incompetent to be successful. 


Lily Bart is a fictional character whose descendants are the help-rejecting thirty- forty- fifty-something women of the 21st century, caught between the twin gears of career and domesticity; the laudanum of yesteryear has morphed into the chronic fatigue and constant guilt of now.


In 1905, Wharton displayed an uncanny understanding of the power of shame to control behaviour and crush hope and like the changing leaves of Autumn, nothing is more entrancing than the last burst of life before it is snuffed out.  As Sim Rosedale observed:

".....the dark pencilling of fatigue under her eyes, the morbid blue pallor of the temples, brought out the brightness of her hair and lips, as though all her ebbing vitality were centred there."

Nougat and paisley corset made by
The Dreamstress

The House of Mirth, published in 1905, novelist Edith Wharton tells the story of a beautiful unmarried socialite, Lily Bart, age 29, and her precipitous fall down the social ladder of New York society. Eight years older than the average age for marriage in 1900, she's nervous about her precarious position within New York society. She runs with a fast crowd, and she must keep up appearances. She needs clothes, fine accessories and the means to travel abroad, and unfortunately, she requires available cash to bet on cards at her friends' gatherings. Toward the beginning of the story she loses three hundred dollars in casual gambling. She's vague about how money works, and it gets worse from there.



Lily shouldn't be betting on cards, but she's not aware of personal finance, and she's caught up in pastimes of her wealthy friends. The women with whom she plays can afford to lose money; they're engaged in the games as just another idle pursuit. Lily, whose father lost money before his death, and her mother, who was excellent at keeping up appearances, requires the money in order to maintain her own illusions of social stature. She looks down on the shabby genteel or indeed anything shabby. She's even dismissive of her best friend, Gerty Farish, a woman who works on behalf of the poor and lives contentedly in her own place. Lily thinks she's above all that.



Lily's circle of friends in New York do not just have money but they have serious money, the type circulating in Fifth Avenue circles in 1900. We're talking Astor money, Vanderbilt money, Morgan money. In November of 1900, the marriage of Louisa Pierpont Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, to Captain Herbert Satterlee, in New York City was the social event of the season. In addition, a whole new class of bourgeois muscled their way into the city, building one ostentatious house after another up a swath of Fifth Avenue. Outside the WASP establishments, many prosperous Jewish merchants sought the same sort of status afforded to members of Old New York.


In The House of Mirth, the character Simon Rosedale courts Lily to be his wife in order to legitimize his rise and break into the establishment. With his rapidly accumulating wealth he repeatedly presents her with a way out of her financial predicament, but she wants nothing of it. It's just not done. In a real life New York equivalent, she could have married someone like millionaire B. (Benjamin) Altman, but for her, and presumably for Wharton, such a proposal could not be considered.


Gus Trenor, a wealthy married man with a Fifth Avenue mansion, offers to help her out with her financial predicament. He suggests a little Wall Street transaction. Wharton writes, "She was too genuinely ignorant of the manipulations of the stock-market to understand his technical explanations, or even perhaps to perceive that certain points in them were slurred; the haziness enveloping the transaction served as a veil for her embarrassment, and through the general blur her hopes dilated like lamps in a fog."



More like a deer in the headlights. Initially, Trenor makes money for her in investments, and Lily resumes the shopping spree. What she doesn't understand is that Trenor expects something in return. When he demands some of her time and company, friends and remaining family members take notice and start to gossip. Her reputation starts to slide. Her ailing aunt is likely to leave her much of anything, and suitable suitors fade away. Her reaction to her predicament is to sustain denial as long as possible.

Found at Walking Off the Big Apple