第1章 Introduction

Edith Wharton (1862-1937), throughout the 75 years’ of her life, devoted nearly 50 years to her career as a professional writer. Under her name go more than 44 books——14 novels plus the unfinished The Buccaneers (1938), 10 novellas, 11 collections of short stories, 9 non-fiction books, and dozens of essays (Garrison 1-2). Among them, The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920) have been cherished as her masterpieces. Her first short story appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1891 when she was 29. At her death in 1937, she was still at work and left behind her a long list of books. During that period of nearly half a century which her literary career spanned, a revolution in morals, manners, and social philosophy altered the way of American life. These works have established her fame as one of the prominent writers in American literary history. In 1921, she became the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. And two years later, she got an honorary Doctorate of letters from Yale University.

Edith Wharton has always been a great interest for modern scholars and critics. The appointment by the Wharton estate of R. W. B. Lewis as official biographer, whose book Edith Wharton was published in 1975 and garnered the Pulitzer Prize, rousing a surging flood of Wharton studies in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Increasing scholarly interest in Wharton found fresh resources and outlets with the founding of Edith Wharton Society in 1984 under the journal Edith Wharton Review. In 1988, the Scribner's published The Letters of Edith Wharton, a volume of her correspondence from 1902 to 1937 edited by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. A year later, the Beinecke Library recatalogued its Edith Wharton Collection, affording access to the significant archival holdings at Yale. Alongside the renewal of academic investment, current interest in the author's life and work has likewise flourished. Evidence for this wider appeal includes the several films based on her fictions, such as The Age of Innocence (directed by Martin Scorcese in 1989). And affordable paperback editions of The House of Mirth including Ammon's Norton Critical Edition (1990) provide not only authoritative texts of the novel, but valuable criticism and contextual material as well as recent interpretive accounts. Most of her novels are centering around the conflict between society and the individual in revolt, with the former triumphing over the latter and forcing the latter into surrender to the social taboos (Lyde 4).

Translation of Wharton's works appeared in China in the early 1950s. For example, Lyu Shuxiang's Chinese version of Ethan Frome was published by Culture and Life Press in Shanghai in 1952. However, her other works did not appear until the late 1980s. The Age of Innocence made its first appearance in 1986, which was translated by Ran Rong and published in Guiyang. Then in 1988, two editions of The House of Mirth translated by Zhang Shuzhi and Zhang Pengzhi were published respectively by the Foreign Literature Press in Beijing. At the end of the 20th century, Wang Jiaxiang & Wang Lili (1997), and Zhao Xingguo & Zhao Ling (1999) translated The Age of Innocence; Pu Long's translation of The House of Mirth (1997) was done followed by another version by Wei Fangbing in 2001. Nevertheless, studies of Edith Wharton did not begin until the late years in the last decade of the 20th century. The House of Mirth, one of Wharton's masterpieces, has attracted great attention among Chinese scholars, but systematic and theoretical discussions of the book remain undone. It is largely due to this fact that I choose to take The House of Mirth as my subject of study in this book.

In 1905, when The House of Mirth made its first appearance in America in a serial version of Scriber's, then as a hard-book in October of that year, it immediately arrested the attention of a large portion of readers. It seemed to be first on everybody's list. Vogue compared it with “the society page of the Sunday newspaper so eagerly read by nursery maids and servant girls and ladies and gentlemen in the hall rooms of cheap boarding-houses, and in the provinces”[1]. In November, the number of copies had reached 80,000, which relieved Mr. Brownell[2] of the apprehension——“that The House of Mirth would probably not go above 40,000”[3]. To quote from Wharton's description in her letter: “It is a very beautiful thought to me that 80,000 people should want to read The House of Mirth. And if the number should ascend to 100,000, I fear my pleasure would exceed the bounds of decency” (Ls 95)[4]. And 140,000 copies were sold as the year drew to a close. The House of Mirth is placed in the world of the Four Hundred in the Gilded Age. “Naturally, first on our lists, this year is The House of Mirth”[5]. Not surprisingly, its success firmly established Edith Wharton's reputation as a novelist, and brought her serious critical attention. In her own words, as a professional novelist, in fact it was her ninth published book. Never had a book published by Scribner's sold at such a rate. At the sweepingly successful launching of The House of Mirth, Wharton reported “a growing sense of mastery that made the work more and more absorbing” (BG 293)[6].

It topped one best-seller list for four months and remained so through 1906, which assuredly gained Wharton a literary success amid the previously unexpected territory of the fashionable turn-of-the-century New York society, a circle she herself lived in and a social milieu she was intimately familiar with, “I write about what I see, what I happen to be nearest to” (Ls 98). As she later admitted, “when I wrote The House of Mirth, I held two trumps in my hand, one was the fact that New York society in the nineties was a field as yet unexplored by any novelist who had grown up in that little hot-house of traditions and conventions; and the other, that as yet these traditions and conventions were unassailed, and tacitly regarded as unassailable” (Wharton 1996: 265-66). The book continued to keep its popularity as it “attained the honor of figuring on the list of the Oxford University Press” (Wharton 1996: 266). Furthermore, the appearance of the novel functioned as a turning point in Edith Wharton's literary career, for it not only established her fame as an important American writer of her time but also marked her coming of age as a novelist. As the writer herself recalled in A Backward Glance that the publication of The House of Mirth had transformed her at the age of 43 from a “drifting amateur into a professional” writer (1990: 941), “before this I did not know to write a novel, but now I know how to find out how to” (940).

The success of the novel is due to a matter of timing, namely, it was an age of unprecedented fortunes which were making and changing that society. As Lily said, “Money stands for all kinds of things” (HM 113)[7]. It is a time when the Civil War millionaires and industrial exploiters, the frontier freebooters, are buying and marrying their way into the tired, defenseless social establishment, whose façade of devotion to older values becomes ever thinner. The narrative identified Wharton in the eyes of her contemporaries and early literary critics as a writer of realistic narrative critiquing the excess wealth and moral bankruptcy class in the New York society. Whereas, some critics would maintain that Wharton never renounces her upper-class circle with Lily's harsh judges, not to mention those scenes when she is exposing their most vicious hypocrisies. The House of Mirth is just self-presenting depiction of a social system on the basis of the accidental distribution and unequal balance of wealth and social privilege. We can observe there are quite different requirement among different social circles. The Dorsets and the Trenors regard it acceptable for women to smoke, gamble or even minor flirting, while for the Gracys or the Van Osburghs, it is zero tolerance with those tiny inappropriate public manners, but for those newly-rich, it is extremely open to any behaviors even the extramarital behaviors. So they would regard the New York society in the novel is just a record of the inexorable process of history as it works itself out in America at the turn of the century. But what these critics haven't noticed is the manipulating skills of Wharton's point of view hidden beneath.

Criticisms upon The House of Mirth and its author have undergone great changes ever since its first appearance in 1905 and as the author herself has noticed: “Fashions in criticism change almost as rapidly as fashions in dress” (Wharton 1996: 293). A wealth of criticism is reprinted in Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Review (1992), edited by Tuttleton, Lauer and Murray; The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (2001) presents a bibliography and surveys the receptions of major works.

Early contemporary reviewers of this novel focused on the social and moral implications of the novel. She was seen as “the greatest thing a writer of fiction can be a moralist” who told the tragic story of a “self-loving and money-loving heroine” trapped by the destructive influences of her wealthy, pleasure-seeking society (Meynell 130). Many later critics have continued to read it as a novel of manners and sentiment in which Wharton depicts a woman who cannot be saved and a society whose valuing of the material and aimless pursuit of luxury, pleasure, and social power shapes and destroys even the potential for goodness. Critics have argued that Lily represented Wharton's critique of her own heroine: Lily cannot choose better moral values, or Lily is a kind of female anachronism——this contradiction of Lily is a figure Wharton cannot accept. In all, such readings make Lily the victim of either her society or her own weaknesses.

To a large extent, the great success of the novel is related to the realistic picture of Wharton's time. Throughout the 19th century's American literature, the issue of women's identity which was explored by various writers has been a permanent theme. It finds different expressions in important authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. Women characters are often represented as virtuous heroines bearing “virtues” of the cultural ideology of womanhood of the Victorian America generalized as purity, piety, domesticity and submissiveness. Hester Prayne's “A” could not have changed from the original “adultery” to the later “able” and “angel” if not for her reticence and years of repentance by doing good to the others. It is almost the same situation with Isabel Archer in James's The Portrait of a Lady. She could not have been a lady if she did not conform to her fate as a wife and return to her husband. However, the Woman's Movement by the turn of the century, in addition to having yielded some socially and politically influential organizations and symbols——the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, the National Federation of Women's Clubs etc., stimulated a new literature in America. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible whose two volumes appeared in 1895 and 1898 analyzed in detail the pervasive misogyny of the Old Testament “in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants” (7). In 1894, Kate Chopin published The Awakening, in which Edna Pontellier walked the first step towards the liberation of women. Affluent, young, and attractive, the mistress of a substantial home, the mother of two healthy sons, the wife of “the best husband in the world” (9), possessed of modest artistic ability, Edna who chose to vacate her well-upholstered niche seems deliberately constructed to test at their most comfortable limits the possibilities of fulfillment for a woman at the turn of the century. With the appearance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics in 1898, there surged a wave of women's yelling against the injustice they received. Edith Wharton, though distanced from this social movement, underwent her own experiences as a woman writer. As Conn noted in The Divided Mind, Ideology and Imagination in America that “by virtue not of class but of sex, she [Wharton] lived her life as a member of a group threatened with a like diminishment to the decorative, the marginal identity” (177). In Conn's view, American women were denied power and individual identity as they were prohibited from becoming either “Venus or Virgin” (177). In a word, their function is only decorative. Such a realistic note finds its literary representation in Wharton's fiction as well. Though Wharton was no conscious feminist, it could be felt throughout the novel that she clearly understood what it meant to be a woman. She seems to be determined to express herself as a woman writer, and this is just the reason that “she could almost certainly be assured of an audience” (Ammons 1990:346). Typical of the traditional female text, Wharton's own life story does little to establish her as a major American writer, in A Backward Glance, her life begins from a garden walk with her father instead of her birth from the very start:

It was always an event in the little girl's life to take a walk with her father, and more particularly so today, because she had on her new winter bonnet, which was so beautiful (and so becoming) that for the first time she woke to the importance of dress, and of herself as a subject for adornment——so that I may date from that hour the birth of the conscious and feminine me in the little girl's vague soul. (BG 2)

Wharton tells her first coming into this world as an adorned female who accompanied by a powerful male, and who will become her escort and guide in her later life. This distinctive contrast between male and female set the foundation for her heroines in literary works. In Wharton's days, it is the convention for a girl to be handed by fathers to a suitable husband, who would resume the male role as masculine wisdom and security. However, it always turns out to be the opposite direction for her male characters in literary works. As Selden, Rosedale, Gus Trenor or other males in The House of Mirth, we can never see such a perfect male to be both wise and secure as a husband or to-be-husband. Neither is her life in reality, as we know she married Theodore Wharton, thirteen years her senior, from a wealthy Boston family. To Wharton's disappointment, the husband was neither competent nor comparable with her intellectually, and they drifted away from each until the climax when Wharton started the divorce sue in 1913. She once conveys clearly that writing was a battlefield of internal struggle between the masculine and the feminine:

The fact is that I am beginning to see exactly where my weakest point is——I conceive my subjects like a man——that is, rather more architectonically and dramatically than most women——and then execute them like a woman; or rather, I sacrifice, to my desire for construction and breadth, the small incidental effects that women have always excelled in, the episodic characterization, I mean. The worst of it is that this fault is congenital and not the result of an ambition to do big things. (Ls 124)

However, despite her great literary success, she is labeled as a writer of “limited scope”, “the historic span of her novels is narrow”, usually confined to those late 19th century realignments of power and status that comprise a high moment in the biography of the American bourgeoisie. “The social range is also narrow, dealing usually with clashes among segments of the rich or with personal relationships as these have been defined, or distorted, by the conventions of a fixed society” (Howe 4). Percy Lubbock's Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947) damned her as a frigid autocrat, hardly in control of her material. Edith Wharton: A Woman in her Time (1971) presented her as a phenomenon of a bygone leisured era, her work is “fading and crumbling and will probably be almost forgotten until a time so detached from the present that people can go back to a little of it as to something quaint and sweet and lavender” (446). What's more, most early critics continued to pair Wharton and James without actual evidence, as if the matter were indisputable, the assumptions rested on a general knowledge of the authors’ friendship, the similar family status, the same social circles as New York and Boston, and their expatriates’ identity. Later, critics continue to put Wharton frequently and directly at the feet of the master (Henry James) as his most proficient and illustrious disciple (Taylor 350-56). Although, in the 1920s, Overton has ever strongly claimed:

The intellectual relation between her and the man who was once called her “master” is now seen in the light which considerably enhances the dignity of the woman who was once called “pupil”. For who, after reading the correspondence of Henry James, published since his death, believes any longer that Mrs. Wharton ever owed anything to that man's patronage so nicely tinctured with snobbery? (345)

However, after Q. D. Levis's “Henry James's Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton”, it greatly reinforced the image of Wharton's overshadowing by James. To this, Wharton responded fiercely in her letter to Brownell: “the continued cry that I am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last ten years I can't read, much as I delight in the man) makes me rather hopeless” (Ls 97). However she tried to defend herself, she is still regarded as “a gifted disciple”, but “not nearly so gifted as the master”; in Howe's opinion, “she [Wharton] lacked James's ultimate serenity, she lacked his gift for summoning in images of conduct the purity of children and the selfless of girls” (17-18) (my emphasis). The reason for this comparison comes from the fact that the two both write about the high society. More importantly, perhaps in several works of both writers, Boston and New York are used as settings of their stories. However such a view is challenged by Bell. In his view, Wharton always “take[s] liberties of authorial intrusion into the narrative” (5). Surely this must have gone against James's insistence on the author's detachment from the scene. In The House of Mirth, the heroine's down-spiraling through the layers of a realistically observed social world——a structure remote from James's tightly centralized designs——his preoccupation with characters’ mental events. For James, the center of consciousness should be capable of taking the widest possible view of the situation, and should never be allowed to record anything beyond his/her perceptive field. And point of view is regarded by James as a very important technical aspect in the construction of the novel. However, Wharton regards James's emphasis on character's limited point of view as a kind of deficiency in novel writing. To her, this “strict geometrical” “design” is one of “the least important things in fiction” (1990: 947). Instead, she always employs the visions of those who are either in close mental and moral relation to each other or who are capable of understanding each other's part in the story. She thinks that point of view plays a significant role in characterization, which I will demonstrate in my analysis of the novel.

After the release of Wharton's private papers held by Yale University in 1968, and with R.W.B. Lewis's Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975), all unveiled a more turbulent Wharton. Coinciding with the rediscovery of women writers in the wave of seventies and eighties feminist activism, many new readings turn to focus on women and women experiences in Wharton's works. Margaret McDowell's Edith Wharton (1976) linked Wharton with other turn-of-century woman writers. Elizabeth Ammons in Edith Wharton's Argument with America (1980) traced changes of attitudes throughout her works: from early uncertainty to strong critique of women's inferior status. The same is Carol Wershoven's The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton (1982). This work presents women energy from negative aspect. Then, Susan Goodman's Edith Wharton's Women: Friends and Rivals (1990) delves into the friendship of Wharton with other women. It is no exaggeration to say that if not for feminist scholars, forty years ago, texts by Wharton could be found only in bookstores selling used books. The exploration of woman writers by feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s has changed the landscape of academic and popular discussion about women and writing dramatically. With their great effort, Wharton is no longer dismissed and labeled as a disciple of Henry James or a secondary writer in American literary history. These feminist critics then turn to Wharton as a champion of women's rights. In Stegner's view, The House of Mirth describes a tragic heroine as “a victim of the society” (120). Such an interpretation draws a flood of feminist readings since the tragedy of Lily Bart seems to offer “a clear caveat against the tenets of the frivolous society” (Wright 82). In consequence, Wharton is seen as “one of feminism's foremothers”, who is though talented and rich, “suffer[s] the persisting ordeal of all women struggling for personal and professional self-definition in a male-dominated world” (Bell 13). Of articles upon The House of Mirth, “The Death of the Lady (Novelist) : Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth” might be a much reprinted essay, in which Showalter links the novel to 19th century woman writing traditions. This essay initiates a hot discussion of Wharton's status as a woman writer as Edith Wharton in Context: Essays on Intertextuality (1999), Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction (2000), Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship (2001). Frances Restuccia (1987) stresses that the novel is about two feminisms. To simplify a complex argument that includes Roland Barthes’ theories of language, one “feminism” treats Lily as art object and victim, the second sees her as a manipulator of patriarchal language. Similarly, Dale Bauer (1988) uses Bakhtinian theories of heteroglossia to explore how Lily misreads the monologic and dialogic language of culture. And Yeazell combines language with economics when drawing upon Thorstein Veblen's term “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” to discuss how “Wharton represents a world in which people acquire and maintain status by openly displaying how much they can afford to waste” (714). The women in the world of this novel create the impression by which people judge social status, “the position of leisure-marker is the only one [Lily] knows how to fill” (719) and she is incapable of labor. Similarly, Wai Chee Dimock's “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth” led to the start of Marxism reading of Wharton. Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics (1995), Edith Wharton's Social Register (2000) are regarded as the two influential ones. Diana Trilling's well known essay, “The House of Mirth Revisited” (1962) argues for Wharton as a mainstream American author by attempting to remove the 1930s’ Marxist prejudice against her “snobbery” as “a society lady become society author” (103), and shows instead how she used class structure to center her novel on moral and social commentary. Employing the language of the marketplace, Dimock (1985) writes: “as a controlling logic, a mode of human conduct and human association, the marketplace is everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous and invisible” (123). The economic language in marketplace is analyzed in the novel. Dimock notices there are contracts unspoken among the wealth, like Mrs. Peniston, or Gus Trenor, but unclear to those without it, like Lily, who ironically is essentially for sale but has to pay for that right. In all, “private morality is finally defenseless against an exchange system that dissolves the language of morality into its own harsh, brassy parlance” (135).

A survey of articles through the years reveal that critical responses to The House of Mirth, from contemporary reviews to the most recent interpretations stand in some relations to the women problem as a social issue. Most criticism has concentrated on Wharton's deep concern for women's marginal position in society at the turn of the century. For this, Elizabeth Ammons comments: “It took her [Wharton] more than a decade to harness and fully understand her situation as she had come to see it; the waste, the crippling, the curtailment” (1980: 3). In a similar way, Joslin argues that the novel's “central question…is the woman's question” (49), and she sees Wharton as “perhaps the best social historian of her day” (52), who “[explores] the social and economic conditions of turn-of-the-century women” (49). This point is further elaborated upon by Bell: “[Wharton] had had to escape from the snares of the society in which she had been bred, a society that defined her as a woman in ways from which she had to break free by making herself a writer. The entrapment from which she had to escape had been precisely defined also in The House of Mirth, which illustrated the condition of female imprisonment both in the milieus of wealth and in the most limited of social circumstances” (10). Obviously, these critics all focus on a social analysis of the female protagonist Lily Bart. Almost unanimously they think that Lily's tragedy is due to her biological identity as a woman. Judith Fryer and Amy Kaplan discern the different houses in the novel and suggest that there is a descending diagonal line indicating the down-sliding fall of Lily Bart from “the house of mirth” to the boarding houses. Like Virginal Woolf, they are critical about the spaces for women both at home and outside. And they suggest that it is the lack of a room of her own that suffocates Lily in the end. In such a case, Lily is interpreted as a victim of the patriarchal society. In Robert Shulman and Wai-chee Dimock's view, Lily's tragedy exemplifies the commodity ideology of Wharton's time. In the marriage market, Lily is reified as a commodity as well as a participant making using of her use value, and “she is a capitalist exploiting her own alienated self in exchange for goods sanctioned by the official custodians of society” (Shulman 269). Lidoff and Orr, based on Berger's gazing theory, analyze Lily's multiple identities of objectification under the observations of different men she encounters in the novel. As “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact” (Mulvey 442), Lily is represented as a visual and erotic object throughout the novel, since she is “the woman who watches herself being watched”, and “turns herself into an object, and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger 427). To borrow from Ammons’ expressions, the whole novel proves a fact that the American patriarchy has robbed women of control of their own lives (1980: 3).

Such an interpretation finds a similar echo among the Chinese scholars and critics. Almost all the criticisms done so far center around the heroine Lily Bart, such as “Lily Bart: a Solitary Soul in The House of Mirth” (Li Jin 2000), “Failure and Winner in the Republic of Spirit” (Zhang Wenfeng 1998). Most Chinese scholars and critics argue that Lily's fate is a matter of her heredity and the patriarchal society, with Pan Jian's “Lily Bart——A Victim of the Patriarchal Society” (2000) as the most typically representative of this.

To sum up, these readings concentrate mainly upon Lily's passivity and her objectified identity. Whenever and wherever Lily Bart appears in the novel, she is always coupled with various descriptions in association with an object: an ornamental flower, a visual object, (Erlich, Lidoff, Montgomery, Orr) or a commodity in the market waiting for the transaction and auction (Dimock, Howard, Shulman). Indeed, on most occasions, she is under the observation of the people around her, which foregrounds her ornamental function to the mannered class. Lily is read as “the disfigurement of any woman who chooses to accept society's definition of her as a beautiful object and nothing more” (Wolff 1977: 110). And she is only a passive substance, a parasite and “a lifeless blossom in the book of life” (Wharton 1909: 261). Critics all insist that Lily is more like an object desired by men around her than a desiring subject (Minter 59) and her fate is related to her “ornamental and floral identity” (Waid 11). As for her ultimate death, they usually read it as an inevitable outcome of the social determinants. As a result, the novel is interpreted as a study of Lily's gradual destruction by a grossly indifferent society (Lewis 150). Her [Lily] story, for the most part points to the “passive incarnations” of the social values (Wolff 1977: 255), which also explains why Blake Nevius interprets the theme of the novel as “the victimizing effect of a particular environment on one of its more helplessly characteristic products” (56). Lily, “a creature of circumstance” (Steele 260) is destroyed by a culture that has taught her to experience herself only as “a beautiful object to be appreciated-or-bought by men” (Fryer 95). While foregrounding Lily's passivity, these readings neglect her complicated psychology both as a passive sufferer and as an active agent consciously struggling for a self.

With a meticulous and penetrating reading of the text as my firm basis, I will reveal such a complexity in Lily Bart, which contributes something new to the various interpretations of the novel. Instead of insisting on Lily's passive acceptance of her socially prescribed identity of passive object——“the woman would view herself not as a person but as an object” (Wolff 1990: 324), I will explore her consciousness of such a social prescription which leads to her voluntary use of the social exchange at the marriage market. By analyzing the characterization of Lily Bart, the attention here goes first to the analogy of characters——“a reinforcement of characterization” (Rimmon-Kenan 70) as “when two characters are presented in similar circumstances, the similarity or contrast between their behavior emphasizes traits characteristic of both” (Rimmon-Kenan 70), for example, Lily's clear look-at-a-return with Rosedale's “fugitive glances”, Lawrence Selden's linguistic paralysis against Lily's repartee etc. As Wharton elaborated in “The Criticism of Fiction” that the interpretations of the novel must be sought “not in the fate of the characters…but in the kind of atmosphere the telling of their history creates the light it casts on questions beyond its borders” (1990:127). The significance of those “stupid people” [episodical characters] (1990: 266) are further explained in the Introduction to The House of Mirth: “such group always rest on an underpinning of wasted human possibilities; and it seemed to me that the fate of the persons embedding these possibilities ought to redeem my subject from insignificance. This is the key to The House of Mirth, and its meaning” (1990: 266). Surely, those direct character-indicators such as speech, point of view are also taken into account in my analysis as they are all seen “primarily as contributing factors in the creation of credible character” in Wharton's novels (Vita-Finzi 42). Besides, “the conscious thoughts and deliberate actions” which are the “key to characters and to the author's reason for depicting that character” (Vita-Finzi 31), are also important for my interpretation of Lily Bart. Since a good story has enthralled readers by “situat[ing] the experiences of his characters more and more in the region of thought and emotion” (Wharton 1996:164), I will point out that Lily's active participation in the society are mainly revealed in her inner consciousness and her deliberate practices of her renunciation. Together with Rimmon-Kenan's narrative conception that “a character's speech, whether in conversation or as a silent activity of the mind, can be indicative of a trait or traits both through its content and through its form” (63), I will call attention to Lily's repartees in her dialogues with others and her “inward drama” (Wharton 1996:182), which shows her consciousness of her prescribed social identity as an object. Lily's consciousness of this fact prompts her, to a large extent, to her awakening of her reality. The shift of point of view in the novel frequently puts Lily in the position of a spectator, which enables her to speculate upon the other characters around her, and which meanwhile informs the reader of her active inner mind. These, in effect, prove that she is not only a “desirable object” but a “desiring subject” as well. In this sense, the characterization of Lily Bart reveals more of her paradoxical status of activity as well as passivity: Lily's consciousness of her objectified identity, her deliberate use of it as her agency to fight her way out as well as her active participation is fully exposed in her relations with other characters. This, in some ways, indicates her struggle for the “assertion” of a problematic self, and it may also explain her persistent rejection of the enticing marriage proposals. She persists in resisting the pressure to play the part prescribed to her by the rigid, arid social narrative by undermining her chances to accept the kind of marriage imposed on her. Her final renunciation of her opportunities to go into the high society by way of “go[ing] into partnership” reflects her only chance of rebellion against that world, a world centering on its tendency to turn everything including human beings into commodity. That gesture is further consolidated by her definite refusal of a series of marriage proposals. She discards Dillworth, deliberately spoils her chance to trap Percy Gryce, refuses George Dorset's wooing, and definitely rejects Rosedale's proposal. Moreover, her decision not to accept Rosedale's suggestion to regain her social status by blackmailing Bertha Dorset, but instead to drop the letters into the fire, and her final settling of her debts to Gus Trenor all cast light on her position as an actor of free choice rather than as a mere passive recipient.

The present study is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 explores how Lily Bart is read as a valuable object by the people around her. Apart from the interpretations of Lily's multiple objectified identities in the eyes of the male characters: valuable commodity to Rosedale, sexual vision to Gus Trenor and aesthetic object to Selden. In this chapter, I will draw attention to Lily's objectification by the female characters in the novel. She is the “last asset” and “nucleus” for her mother, a useful gadget at the writing table for Judy Trenor and a “defensive missile” for Bertha Dorset. Such facts prove Lily's helplessness in her choice in life, thus accentuating the pathos of Lily's tragedy, which casts light on the conditions of female imprisonment at the turn of the century.

In Chapter 2, I will examine Lily Bart's various interactions with people around her. Different from the previous emphasis on Lily's passivity as an object, my interpretation here will shed light on her consciousness of her identity as an object and her activity in the participation in the making of it. Rather than reading Lily as being stranded, I will call attention to her awareness of her passive role as an object, which in turn alerts her to some conscious participation into the social interactions. Her witty dialogue, her presence of mind and her grace at critical moments in the story always make her “the mistress of the situation”. Besides, her active gaze and her clear look-at-a-return when confronted with others always strand and debilitate those who are gazing at her, which reverses the traditional gender role of men and women. I will point out that Lily's paradoxical identity must weaken the previous readings of her as “a helpless puppet on a sluggish stream of fatality” (Wharton 1996:172), and surely will shed light on her ultimate death.

In Chapter 3, pursuing the previous chapter's analysis of Lily's consciousness and her activity in the social interactions, I will trace back her life trajectory from her debut to her final death. Such a process shows that she always practices the right to reject. From her early refusal of Dillworth to her last rejection of Rosedale, we see more a Lily of “free will” than a Lily of mere passivity. She would rather choose one from those suitors by herself than being passively chosen by them. However, Lily's “free choice” and rejection in essence are within the social frame of Wharton's time, which only accentuates the pathos of her helplessness while at the same time revealing the dire position of woman at the turn of the century. Her rejection of Rosedale's suggestion of using Bertha's adultery letters to regain her social value and the subsequent settling of her debts and bills are her voluntary give-up of “the house of mirth”. In consequence, I will argue that her last resort to death is the only “free” choice of her own, which is also her simultaneous renunciation of being used and using other people for survival.

Finally, the conclusion will first offer a summary of my study here. By analyzing the characterization of the heroine Lily Bart in the novel, I do not only review Lily's objectified identity but also delve into her consciousness and reveal her active “inner drama”. However, Lily's activity leads in no way to her freedom and independence. Instead, it adds more pathos to the novel. It is just Lily's paradoxical status between activity and passivity that reveals the real situation of women at the turn of the century, which is entrapped between “the domestic plot of feminine sacrifice and the new plots of female resistance” (Orr 31). Then at the end of this part, I’ll give a prospective speculation of my future studies concerning some untouched fields in Wharton's art of fiction, such as Wharton's theoretical contributions to novel theory.

Notes

[1]Vogue, November 30, 1905, p.715

[2]Mr. Brownell, the head of Scribner's book publishing department.

[3]This is addressed to Edward L. Burlingame on November 23, 1905, the editor of Scriber's magazine——the publication in which The House of Mirth initially appeared as a serial.

[4]The letters mentioned in this book are from The Letters of Edith Wharton (short written as Ls in the following), ed. by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, New York: Charles Scriber's Sons, 1988, pp. 90-92, 94-100.

[5]Vogue, November 30, 1905, p.715

[6]Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (short written as BG hereafter), New York: Scribner's, 1964.

[7]Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990. All the quotes from the novel will be short written as HM hereafter.