Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth examines the society of Gilded Age New York through the eyes of its main character, Lily Bart, who simultaneously strives to enfold herself into the world of wealth and security through marriage and strains against the weight of these social expectations in search of freedom. The relationships Lily has within high society often function through transaction: Lily helps her friend Judy with secretarial tasks, which she describes as “social drudgery to perform” (Wharton 43); Mr. Trenor helps her financially so she must be endearing to a man who disgusts her; Bertha Dorset invites her to join her cruise so Lily can provide company and distraction for her husband. Lily completes these transactions even as the other members of her society treat her as a commodity, and Lily is willing to perform for their sake in order to be accepted into their world and to be valued by men as a potential wife. Yet, not only does Wharton criticize society for commodifying Lily, but she develops the greatest tragedy of a woman who commodifies and objectifies herself because society has prompted her to do so.
Throughout the novel, Lily is keenly aware of the influence and power of her own beauty, while she is fearful of its decay because she knows the value society sees in her will also decline as she ages and loses her beauty. At 29 years old, she feels the imminent closure of society’s favor towards her and desperately seeks a husband to secure a permanent place in high society, but she cannot stop sabotaging herself and evading every potential offer of marriage from men she doesn’t actually love. Beauty as the location of Lily’s power, however, presents a treacherous problem, which Wharton points out in evoking the ephemeral nature of Lily’s physical beauty. Early on in the novel, Lily fails to recognize this and deludes herself: “Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end” (Wharton 53). However, this is the antithesis of Wharton’s point that every woman’s beauty will pass away; Lily locating her power and value in her beauty is her fatal mistake in Wharton’s illustration of her main character.
At the same time, though, Lily does recognize the waning favor of society as her clock runs towards her thirties, and she knows she must find a husband to maintain a foothold in her world. One night at Bellomont, as she considers a potential marriage to Percy Gryce and reflects on the pressure of social expectations and her dwindling cheque-book balance, she looks at herself in the mirror before bed and grows alarmed at the signs of age encroaching onto her face:
As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek. “Oh, I must stop worrying!” she exclaimed. “Unless it’s the electric light–” she reflected, springing up from her seat and lighting the candles on the dressing-table. She turned out the wall lights and peered at herself between the candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained. Lily rose and undressed in haste. “It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about,” she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them. (Wharton 31-32)
Perched on the crux of what will be her crucial decision and the contributor of her inward turmoil throughout the novel (to marry or not to marry), Lily looks into the mirror and conceptualizes her beauty as the tool for her security, thus objectifying herself. Berger’s Ways of Seeing articulates the trouble with Lily’s situation: speaking to society, “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight” (Berger et al. 51). Examining her reflection in the mirror, Lily sees herself as society sees her: an object, a human beauty-commodity created into a sight by society. Highly adept and trained in performing for other people, this is a scene in which Lily is performing for herself–trying and failing to truly convince herself that she is not losing the power her beauty affords, which would be detrimental to her ambitions but perhaps exactly what she needs to free herself from society’s clasp. As she looks into the mirror, society’s objectification of Lily is made manifest through her own eyes, and reflected back at her are all her hopes and fears in just two wrinkles forming around her mouth.
In the end, Lily is unable to take the key step of making the choice which is the fundamental question of the novel: either to embrace the society she abhors or to renounce and abandon it. Ultimately, it becomes clear either path will lead to her destruction: she cannot live within the society which has fashioned her into a commodity, merely a beautiful object and sight who must perform for the pleasure of its onlookers, but she also cannot live without it, as she has ingrained into herself society’s vision for her and truly believes her purpose is vested in her commodification. This is Lily’s true tragedy: because society has placed a mirror into her hand and told her to look upon herself as an object, she accepts the belief that she is one.
Works Cited
Berger, John, et al. “Chapter 3.” Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, London,
pp. 45–64.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New American Library.