What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (29 page)

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I have sometimes thought that a women’s nature is like a great house full of rooms; there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a doorstep that never comes
. —The Fullness of Life (
1891)

In Wharton’s scheme, Lily Bart’s fate was to be beautiful, to become poor and unmarriageable, and to die a suicide, a tragic heroine. Like bread crumbs, Wharton scatters clues to Lily’s predicament. “[S]he likes being good and I like being happy,” Lily says
of poor Gerty Farish to Lawrence Selden. Some of the clues correspond to Selden’s grand idea, proposed once to Lily, that there is a “republic of the spirit” she might enter. Lily’s conflict—her wish for freedom but her sense “that I never had any choice”—conspires to keep her from the independent or idiosyncratic life Selden represents. (His republic of the spirit is an imaginary structure, perhaps the house of mirth itself.)

Wharton’s use of architecture operates in the traditional way—as built structure, as expression of the symbolic order, as place, as evidence of the hierarchical order—but it is exercised for fictive ends. The novel begins in a terminal, Grand Central Station, and terminates in a rented room. The “house” is first a capacious, modern public building, a place anyone may enter and pass through, and last a cramped space open to the public but required only by the poor. Lily journeys, like Richard II, from bigness to smallness, from a magnificent building that seems infinite—kingdom, modern world—to small rented room of desperate finitude—cell, deathbed. Space and place change with Lily Bart, or change her.

***

Lawrence Selden makes Lily happy or sad whenever they meet. It is Selden whom Lily encounters by chance in Grand Central Station, and it’s Selden who finds Lily dead at the novel’s end. His presence frames Lily’s life, ghosts and subverts it, as the rooms, scenes and encounters Wharton sets Lily in structure it. What the reader knows of Lily’s thoughts about her impossible position
is gleaned primarily in her discussions with Selden, her foil and confidante. Selden is a fitting comrade, a modern flawed hero or antihero. He arouses the dubious sprite fortune and its reversals, and with its partner hope and possibility, plagues Lily. No one underwrites Lily’s placelessness, or lovelessness, more than Selden.

Wharton had a keen interest in ghost stores and the supernatural, and Selden flits through
The House of Mirth
as if it were a Gothic tale and he were its elusive hero. Selden is a haunted and haunting figure who magnifies Lily’s unfitness and increasing inappropriateness whenever he appears. Her double in drag, he even impedes her so-called progress with other suitors, fulfilling his double-agent, phantom-lover mission as the budding star in a magnificent sense of plot points. His last appearance at Lily’s bedside makes her death more pointedly tragic and beautiful, since we see her through his shattered vision. At that deadly moment Selden becomes a character—or an ornament—Wharton might have borrowed from Poe.

The House of Mirth
was originally titled “A Moment’s Ornament.” Lily Bart could have been its temporary decoration. Though from Lily’s point of view, the occasional ornament could have been Selden. But then Wharton enjoyed symmetries. Her house, the Mount in Lenox Massachusetts, which she designed and had built, has three front doors, one of them fake; Wharton wanted the façade to be symmetrical. Selden is symmetrical to Lily and does balance her even as he unbalances her. (Symmetry to Wharton, “the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration” [
Decoration
, 7].) The uncoupled couple, the two-faced couple, articulates Wharton’s comprehension of how
women’s changed, conflictual desires are met by changed, conflicted men. Both are, in a way, misfits, though Selden’s eccentricity and inappropriateness, including his bachelorhood, have value while Lily’s spinsterhood and virginity daily lose theirs.

***

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
. (Decoration, 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)