From Tea to Chloral: Raising the Dead Lily Bart

Abstract

Gad! what study might be made of the of the stomach - - The House of Mirth (309) Much has been made of the square fashionable society showered upon the hall-table of young Lily Bart's New York home (44). Much has also been made of the consequent oblong - constant reminders of the price of fashion - that were allowed to gather dust the depth of bronze jar (44).(1) But the invitation and the bill are not the only envelopes tyrannizing Lily's society. Fashionable New York is equally subject to the tyranny of the stomach, if less conspicuously so (309). Wharton's New York society The House of Mirth is, without doubt, consuming society, both figuratively and literally. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell and Elizabeth Ammons, among others, have noted, America's turn-of-the-century leisured class displayed its incomparable wealth by engaging what Thorstein Veblen terms the conspicuous consumption of material goods (75). Appropriately, Wharton would have us imagine her consuming materialists through metaphors of food and digestion: George Dorset's mournful dyspeptic temper; Gus Trenor's carnivorous head; Carry Fisher's general air of embodying 'spicy paragraph'; and Ned Silverton's tendency to be critical of truffles (85-87). Silverton even observes, with Titanic pessimism (we might add naturalism), that a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the universe (309). As happens, his off-hand prediction rings true for Lily Bart, as Dorset's gastric distress signifies his more threatening marital distress, distress whose ultimate relief requires that a woman's - her own - be ruined (309). From Dorset's troubled marriage to Lily's struggle the marriage market, The House of Mirth depicts characters whose psychological and physiological lives are consumed by society with voracious appetite for status. Lily Bart's pursuit of social status as an empowered consumer presents her with paradox: order to become consumer she must first present herself as an item to be consumed. For Lily, this paradox becomes seesaw of conflicting social and psychological needs that seem opposed to such degree of inevitability that one begins to wonder about the role of literary naturalism the novel.(2) Indeed, recent years have seen renewed interest the influences of American and German naturalism on Wharton's writing. Donald Pizer observes that it is now common to view The House of Mirth particular as in the naturalistic camp (The Naturalism 242). While he notes that studies of literary naturalism have the past almost entirely neglected Wharton's novels, largely because she was not male and did not often write about the lower classes, he affirms those who have initiated the rediscovery of Wharton as naturalist novelist (American Naturalism 127).(3) This rediscovery, the case of The House of Mirth, has been based on abundant textual evidence suggesting that Wharton, fully conversant with the tenets and tropes of naturalistic philosophy and fiction, consciously depicted Lily Bart as victim of her social environment. The naturalistic language of imprisonment is so pervasive, fact, that his most recent comments on the novel Pizer has offered only two exceptions to its seemingly ubiquitous law of social determinism - Nettie Struther and Lawrence Selden - one triumphing over her environment through pure strength of will, the other transcending through faith, albeit unsubstantiated, human possibility (The Naturalism 244-46).(4) But even those who find Wharton modifying conventional naturalism by offering occasional exceptions to the rule of social determinism might nonetheless pronounce Lily Bart's life and death clearly naturalistic.(5) After all, she dies victim of her own lack of moral courage, which is to say, victim of the social environment that created her such lack. …