Reinforcing Roles in 'House of Mirth' - Book Report/Review Example

Reinforcing Roles Women were slaves in the early twentieth century, slaves to social conventions and a male dominated business world. Very few women were able to escape the specific roles assigned to them by their gender and social status. Edith Wharton’s book, House of Mirth, published in Scribner magazine, became America’s best-selling book with 140,000 copies in print (Worth, 1994: 44). The House of Mirth was the first novel written by a woman writer to be taken seriously by the nation’s male literary establishment. It is being suggested that Wharton’s acceptance among the literary establishment was due to her willingness to force her characters to conform to the feminine ideal. Those who didn’t were seen to fail miserably while those who worked within the prescribed and male-sanctioned limits were seen to achieve some form of success relative to her position in life and her personal inclinations. While she demonstrates variety in the ways in which women could choose to live their lives, she also indicates those areas in which different types of women could still find acceptance and personal expression. Therefore, underlying the obvious appeal to the proper ideal of womanhood, Wharton introduces a concept of women’s liberation precisely in Lily’s inability to conform to societal structures. To understand how this is accomplished, an understanding must be reached regarding how the feminine ideal was defined as well as to look closely at the various female characters that are portrayed in the book, whether they are considered a success or a failure and how this related to the feminist movement. Starting with Barbara Welter in the mid-1960s, feminist scholarship has explored the various issues and aspects of the ‘cult of True Womanhood.’ This phrase refers to an ideology that developed in the mid-nineteenth century that defined what it meant to be a True Woman in America during that time period as it is represented in the written records of diaries, journals, newspapers, magazines and other media and is most effective in describing the concept of feminine held by Wharton’s primary audience. “The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them, she was promised happiness and power” (Welter, 1966: 152). Scholarship has focused on how this ideology was promoted both by women and men, constricting others to ‘fall into line’ if they wished to be accepted in society. “The dominant image remains that of a middle-class housewife happily trading in agricultural labor alongside men for the joys of urban domesticity and childrearing” (Hewitt, 2002: 156). Although the idea of the True Woman really only defined a small percentage of the women of America, namely the white, middle-class urban woman, this ideology functioned to both constrain women from participating in the world outside of the home as well as to propel women into the outer world and codified ideals that had been a part of Western tradition for centuries. As has been mentioned, the ideals of the True Woman were founded on four core principles – those of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. According to Hewitt (2002), “native born northern white women became an increasingly undifferentiated category, all middle-class adherents of a dominant ideal. As work on women who stood outside the cult’s reach multiplied, then, true womanhood lost its contested, dynamic character and became hostage to all the retrograde values that affluent white womanhood masked in a field newly focused on difference and conflict.” The hierarchy of these four core values was further delineated by Welter in their order of social importance. “Young men looking for a mate were cautioned to search first for piety, for if that were there, all else would follow” (Welter, 1966: 152). Because religion didn’t take women away from her proper place within the home like so many other societies or movements did, piety was considered a safe avenue for a woman to pursue. “She would be another, better Eve, working in cooperation with the Redeemer, bringing the world back from its revolt and sin. The world would be reclaimed for God through her suffering” (Welter, 1966: 152). Next to piety, purity was necessary in order to access the power inherent in the cult. “Without [purity] she was, in fact, no woman at all, but a member of some lower order … To contemplate the loss of purity brought tears; to be guilty of such a crime … brought madness or death” (Welter, 1966: 154). However, this power was expected to be relinquished upon the wedding night as the woman traded in her purity, setting up a paradox that proved difficult to explain away. “Woman must preserve her virtue until marriage and marriage was necessary for her happiness. Yet, marriage was, literally, an end to innocence. She was told not to question this dilemma, but simply to accept it” (Welter, 1966: 158). Therefore, submission became a defining aspect of the feminine, also placing her squarely by her own fireside first as daughter and sister, later as wife and mother, bringing in the fourth dimension of domesticity. “If she chose to listen to other voices than those of her proper mentors, sought other rooms than those of her home, she lost both her happiness and her power” (Welter, 1966: 173). Thus was the feminine vision defined, a definition that strikes suspiciously close to the representations of woman as she has appeared throughout Western literature. Although Edith Wharton went against these rules by succeeding in business herself, she maintained the period’s belief system that a woman’s place was in her home and within social circles, circles that were considered to be firmly established at whatever level the woman reached by the time she reached the age of 30. “The threshold of thirty established for women by nineteenth-century conventions of ‘girlhood’ and marriageability continued in the twentieth century as a psychological observation about the formation of feminine identity. While Wharton’s ideas about personality were shaped by Darwinian rather than by Freudian determinants, she shared Freud’s pessimism about the difficulties of change for women” (Showalter, 1985:133). In this view, a young woman not yet married for the first time by the time she reaches age 30 is doomed to remain forever a maid while those who have passed beyond the realms of ‘girlhood’ might have other options open to them, which is suggested in the various roles played by the various other female characters within the novel. However, Wharton also illustrates, in the very way in which the story is told, how these ideas were beginning to be questioned as writers such as herself wrote “about troubled and troubling young women who were not always loved by their American readers” (Ammons, : 27) because of the disturbing look that was being taken into the consequences of such rigid feminine constraints. In her book, Wharton reinforces this idea of feminine success through the characters of Judy Trenor, Bertha Dorset and even Carrie Fisher. Judy Trenor is so incapable of handling business that even her own desk seems to overwhelm her as she complains to Lily about her usual secretary, “It was simply inhuman of Pragg to go off now,… She says her sister is going to have a baby — as if that were anything to having a house party!” (Wharton, 1994: 42). Bertha Dorset, although depicted as a horrible woman who has almost open affairs with other men, is nevertheless still married to George Dorset, and is therefore considered acceptable to society and seen as successful to the world. She is able, in the end, to use her money and social status as a weapon against Lily Bart, forever keeping her ostracized from society. Carrie Fisher, known far and wide for bringing the newly rich into the fashionable society circles, is seen as successful because her ‘profession’ remains strictly within the bounds of the feminine social realm rather than truly venturing into the world of business. However, at the same time that she demonstrates these women to be successes, Wharton illustrates the sacrifices that have been made. Lily “knows that she cannot be saved by a society which, in one way or another, can only destroy as it gratifies: to be a Judy Trenor is to be a comfortable lost soul, to be a Bertha Dorset is to be a desperate one. To initiate the newly-rich into society’s inner sphere as Carrie Fisher does, is to live as a parasite in a well-furnished vacuum” (Gargano, 1972: 140). So if marriage to a wealthy man is not the specific answer to be sought by a woman who wishes to remain true to herself, Wharton begins to question what is the solution. Other than her main character Lily, Wharton introduces Gerty Farish, and Nettie Struther as examples of other women who are failing to live up to the feminine ideal and their subsequent fates. Behavior, rather than business, is the focus of Gerty Farish. When discussing her with Seldon, Lily “smiled a little unkindly, ‘But I said marriageable — and besides, she has a horrid little place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the washing and the food tastes of soap’” (Wharton, 1994: 9). She is a failure not because she is not surviving, but because she is unmarriageable and does not have the typical social amenities necessary for life in her natural social circle. Nettie Struther, on the other hand, represents a woman failing because she is trying to escape her socially prescribed role in society. However, it is Gerty who is demonstrated to be perfectly capable of taking care of herself as well as others. It is Gerty who is capable of seeing Lily as being “the more piteously in want of aid, the more exposed to the claims of a tenderness she was so little conscious of needing” (Wharton, 1994: 256). Unlike Gerty Farish, who will forever be considered unmarriageable and therefore unfeminine, Nettie Struther is able to redeem herself by conceding to those roles she had earlier tried to circumvent. She tells Lily, “When you sent me off that time I never thought I’d come back alive, and I didn’t much care if I did. You see I didn’t know about George and the baby then” (Wharton, 1994: 306). Nettie’s disease was brought on after having been left by her wealthy lover, and she was cured through George’s eventual acceptance of her and the strength he continuously gave her, rather than by any inherent strength of her own. And again, it is Nettie who arrives to help Lily in her final hours, unwittingly demonstrating how her loyalty and faithfulness to herself and her feelings has enabled her to find the kind of life she dreamed of. Edith Wharton best emphasizes the pull and push of the female struggle through her portrayal of Lily Bart, a woman shown to be without form or success without the influence of a man yet incapable of fully abandoning herself to a definition that is less than what she feels she ought to be. At the beginning of the novel, Lily’s interests and pursuits are dictated by the man she is attempting to attract at the given time. She “easily charms Gryce with her considerable feminine wiles” (Worth, 1994: 46) after she had learned all she can about Americana literature, Gryce’s only hobby. In dealing with Mr. Trenor and Mr. Bart, she gives each of them undivided, customized attention according to their desires rather than her own. Finally, Lily has reached the end of her proverbial rope and makes a last effort to save herself by offering to marry Mr. Rosedale, someone she refused to consider earlier in the story. As he proposes a way for her to redeem her former status, “she found the indignation [to the plan] gradually freezing on her lip…” (Wharton, 1994: 252) as she starts to contemplate taking other actions she had thus far scrupulously avoided. Without the assistance of a man, Lily is also totally incapable of managing her own finances. When Mrs. Trenor mentions “it was the idea of the gambling debt that frightened Percy” (Wharton, 1994: 76), the reader realizes that Lily’s chances for Mr. Gryce are destroyed by her gambling. Her only other attempt to get into business is a disastrous partnership with Gus Trenor in which “Lily naively believes that Gus will invest a portion of her meager income in the stock market and make ‘a killing’” (Worth, 1994: 47). The reader knows that Lily’s final attempt to support herself through work at a millenary shop cannot work because of the conversation she had with Seldon at the opening of the story. “Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?” She sighed. “I suppose so. What else is there?” (Wharton, 1994: 11). Lily cannot be a success because she doesn’t have a man to support her, to guide her, or to train her in another area. By the end of the book, Lily has run out of marriage prospects, and therefore, fails at life. “Like the old Bolshevik who confesses to uncommitted crimes in attestation of the superior moral authority of the state, Lily affirms the absolute power of society over the life of the individual by her demonstration that she is finally incapable of effective action on her own behalf” (Trilling, 1962-1963: 128). Lily reflects on the differences between what she might do in society as opposed to the many more things Carry Fisher can do. “It all turned on the tiresome distinction between what a married woman might, and a girl might not, do” (Wharton, 1994: 79) is the conclusion at which Lily arrives. If Lily had been married even once, she would have held much greater freedoms in her actions. In addition, Lily could not perform any of the social obligations she had dreamed of doing without the security of a marriage. Although Gerty Farish is capable of performing social work as a full-time activity, Lily does not even consider it as something to do until after she has secured her wealth (Wharton, 1994: 111). In the end, Lily dies unmarried. Carry Fisher seems to sum up Lily’s character the best when she tells Seldon: “That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic…. Sometimes I think it’s just flightiness — and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart, she despises the things she’s trying for” (Wharton, 1994: 185). In other words, she failed at life because she did not have the strength of a husband to hold her up. Lily’s failure to find a husband as well as her failure to succeed in business has been demonstrated to be a triumph rather than a failure by several critics reading the novel from the twentieth century perspective. Although she had plenty of examples of how to behave successfully in the characters of Judy Trenor, Gerty Farish, and Netty Struther, all three successful in very different ways, she could not bring herself to compromise her own identity so completely. This is perhaps most blatantly illustrated in her quiet act of burning Bertha Dorset’s love letters to Selden rather than using them to gain advantage over the woman who had destroyed Lily’s own chances within the upper society. In the end, Lily dies quietly after having struggled with herself to remember a specific word, which is never identified, yet which gives Selden life and Lily peace in death. This word, according to Susan Gubar, is the entire point of the novel. It “is Lily’s dead body; for she is now converted completely into a script for his edification, a text not unlike the letters and checks she has left behind to vindicate her life … Lily’s history then, illustrates the terrors not of the word made flesh, but of the flesh made word. In this respect, she illuminates the problems Wharton must have faced in her own efforts to create rather than be created” (1982: 81), just as numerous women of her generation struggled with the same issue, eventually leading to the greater freedom and flexibility experienced by women today. Throughout the novel, Wharton continues to present a surface case of a young woman who continuously fails to meet with the tenants of polite society, therefore continues to fail at achieving the only respectable means of securing a happy and comfortable life for herself. However, she also continues to present a case for the individual woman and her underlying ability to accomplish much more than what she has been constrained to do. This is illustrated not only in the case of Lily, who epitomizes this creative conflict, but also in the various other female characters that inhabit the book, both good and bad. Through this novel, Edith Wharton was able to finally gain acceptance by the male literary world because she provided for women a bleak example of what could happen to them if they chose to step outside of their social bonds. Lily’s failure was not a threat to the male dominated society. In fact, it seemed instead to reinforce its ideals in proper female behavior and was given high literary acclaim. The fact that the story was written by a woman gave it even more credibility in the instruction of other women on proper feminine behavior. However, the subtext spoke to women of a crying need for change, of a struggle that was not one woman’s alone, but that was felt by many. In the end, the way in which the book is ultimately understood will continue to depend largely upon the perspective of the individual reader. Works Cited Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens, GA, 1980. Gargano, James W. “The House of Mirth: Social Futility and Faith.” American Literature. Vol. 44, N. 1, (March 1972), pp. 137-143. Gubar, Susan. “The ‘Blank Page’ and Female Creativity.” Writing and Sexual Difference. Elizabeth Abel (Ed.). Chicago, 1982. Hewitt, Nancy. “Taking the True Woman Hostage.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 14, N. 1. 2002, pp. 156-62. Showalter, Elaine. “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.” Representations. Vol. 9, Special Issue, (Winter 1985), pp. 133-149. University of California Press. Trilling, Diana. “The House of Mirth Revisited.” American Scholar. Vol. 32, (Winter, 1962-1963). Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly. Vol. 18, N. 2, P. 1, 1966, pp. 151-74. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Ed. Martha Banta. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1994. Worth, Richard. Classic American Writers: Edith Wharton. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Read More