MISSION

SUBMISSION FORM

EDITOR'S NOTE

ABSTRACTS

SCHOLARLY ESSAYS

SHORT STORIES
-Fiction
-Non-Fiction

POETRY

DATABASE

BIOGRAPHIES

PREVIOUS ISSUES

The American Novelist and Lily Bart’s Excessive Americanness
Ben P. Robertson

 “There is only one way in which man or woman can develop real strength,
and that is to fight unceasingly and to stand absolutely alone.”
—Gertrude Atherton, 1904

In a 1904 discussion of the bourgeois nature of the American novel, Gertrude Atherton claimed that Americans can achieve “real strength” only by standing “absolutely alone” in the production of literary texts (200). Atherton’s point was to chide American writers for their unwillingness to move beyond a “high-water mark of mediocrity” in American letters, but taken in terms of class and social status, her statement has implications beyond America’s borders. Because of the relative youth of their country, American writers always have struggled with the lack of a “usable past,” as Van Wyck Brooks called it—a longstanding cultural identity on which to build the foundations of their artistic endeavors (213). Consequently, they have faced the dilemma either of creating their own cultural foundations as Brooks suggests or of drawing on European culture. This continuing struggle between Old World and New World influence finds expression in the character of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. In essence, Lily’s ultimate downfall can be interpreted as a literary expression of the fates of American novelists who refuse to find a “usable past” in European culture. On the surface, Lily disdains America and its culture, preferring European influences, just as many American novelists—including Wharton herself—relied on European culture in their writings. However, Lily has a major flaw; at the most basic level, she is too American—too bourgeois. Like so many American novelists of Wharton’s time, Lily cannot move beyond her Americanness. Consequently, Wharton suggests in this novel that the source of “real strength” for the American novel is a stronger reliance on European influences.

This implied preference for Europe on Wharton’s part conflicts with the attitudes of many critics before, during, and even after her lifetime. In 1837, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed hopefully in “The American Scholar” address that America’s “long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” was drawing to a close (48). His statement, however, was premature, for a few years later in 1846, Margaret Fuller complained that American literature did not exist. Noting Americans’ reliance on European models, she commented, “Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature” (37). Similarly, in 1871, Walt Whitman lamented the lack of “native authors” and claimed that America possessed “no literature at all” (121; 127).

Whitman’s was a statement of lamentation, but Wharton would have suggested that the strength of the American novelist could come from Europe. She possessed no great love for America and embraced European influences with gusto. Wharton spent much of her youth in Europe, and she “never ceased yearning to return” (Wright 73). In fact, she visited many European countries as an adult, buying two homes in France and eventually becoming an expatriate. After one of her many trips to France before she left America permanently, she grumbled about returning and noted, “I am not enough in sympathy with our ‘gros public’ [in America] to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side” (Lewis 120). In other words, Americans were too uncultured—too vulgarly popular in their tastes—to please Wharton. In 1903, for example, she extolled the “stored beauty & tradition & amenity” of Europe while lamenting the “crassness” of America (Foster 129). According to Sarah Bird Wright, Wharton believed Americans had a deficiency in valuing arts and ideas because of the “relative youth of her native country as compared with the lengthy heritage of European art and culture” (74). Given this attitude on Wharton’s part, it is quite logical to suggest that she disagreed with the ideal of American literary independence espoused by Emerson, Fuller, and Whitman and that she did, indeed, give preference to a reliance on European culture in her texts.

Wharton’s preference for Europe surfaces in Lily Bart. The narrator notes at one point that Lily would have preferred to marry an “English nobleman” or an “Italian prince” rather than the American men she knows (30). Wealth itself is not enough; Lily also wants a title. Lily herself already has certain “foreign” qualities which Mrs. Peniston initially finds intimidating (31). Specifically, Lily has a “familiarity with foreign customs” which she learned during her yearly trips to Europe with her family. Even the architecture of her friends’ houses is copied from European styles. Mrs. Bry’s house is based on the French Trianon at Versailles, and the Trenor house is of Corinthian design (126). Faced with a possible marriage to Simon Rosedale, Lily postpones making a decision by eagerly accepting an invitation to cruise the Mediterranean with the Dorsets. The idea of spending time on the Riviera appeals to her much more than does a marriage for money. She then embarks on a sort of pilgrimage to Europe, just as American writers sought inspiration from European sources. Lily finds herself in Monaco, where she consorts with the Duchess of Beltshire, whose title indicates aristocratic European heritage. Again, Lily demonstrates a clear preference for European culture.

This preference for Continental culture is apparent in Lily’s unalloyed disdain of America and its culture. When she returns to America, for example, she does so “reluctantly” (177). Of course, she has been socially ostracized by her American friends for her alleged romantic designs on Mr. Dorset, which would account for some of her reluctance, but she disdains American culture regardless of her social conflicts. She leaves the Duchess of Beltshire only because she knows the Duchess will “at any moment drop her in favour of a new protégée.” Furthermore, her attitude is quite clear at the beginning of the novel as she discusses Percy Gryce’s collection of Americana, calling it “horribly dull” with a “slight grimace” (11). Her negative attitude toward America and its culture is quite obvious.

Despite this negative attitude, however, Lily Bart is exactly what she dislikes—an American—and therein lies her downfall. Although she disdains American culture, she embodies that culture on the most basic level—so basic that she herself does not see it. Her experience thus parallels that of Wharton, about whom Millicent Bell comments that all her feelings of loneliness and expatriation made her all “the more American” (64). American culture has always placed a strong emphasis on capitalism and on democratic ideals, whereas European culture traditionally has been based on feudalism and monarchy. Capitalism, of course, is based on an obsession over acquiring capital, and democracy has an inherent tendency to equalize the social classes into one great middle class—the bourgeoisie. Without realizing it, Lily demonstrates these quintessentially American qualities, engaging in capitalistic ventures and moving herself even further into the bourgeoisie than she was at the beginning of the text.

Lily’s excessive Americanness may not be obvious on a first reading of The House of Mirth, but it becomes quite visible on closer examination. For example, even though Lily disdains Gryce’s Americana collection, she comments, in a capitalistically American way, that items of that sort “fetch fabulous prices” (11). She later dissembles an interest in Americana as she attempts to keep Gryce’s attention on the train. Through her deception of him, she commodifies herself for Gryce as she tries to fashion herself into a product that he will essentially buy in marriage. Cynthia Griffin Wolff reinforces this idea of commodification by calling Lily a “collectable piece of ‘art’” that has marketable value (259). Because of its capitalistic nature as a pseudo-commercial transaction in which money is involved, such a venture is quite American. At one point, the narrator comments that Lily “determined to be to [Gryce] what his Americana had hitherto been” (41). In making this decision, Lily herself has become Americana. This self-commodification in which Lily engages appears again in her later attempts to sell herself in marriage to Simon Rosedale and then to Lawrence Selden. As in the case with Gryce, she becomes a product that she must sell with her capitalistic ingenuity. Admittedly, she does reject Gryce and Rosedale at the beginning of the text in a sort of anti-capitalistic move to “stand alone,” but her Americanness reasserts itself with vigor near the end of the story, and she again tries to sell herself to Rosedale (Gryce is already married at this point). Even at the end of the novel, Lily continues her obsession with capital by settling all her bills before she dies. Lawrence Selden is surprised to find that there is “not an unpaid account” among Lily’s bills (255). This obsession with capital makes Lily a clear symbol of America.

Of course, the America symbolism is visible, too, in Lily’s association with the bourgeoisie. When she asks Gus Trenor to invest money for her (another capitalistic venture), she solidifies her American nature because investments of this sort associate her with bourgeois “new money” rather than the aristocratic “old money” one might find in Europe. Furthermore, she eventually lowers her social standing to a more bourgeois level by associating with the Gormers, whom she had always “fastidiously avoided” (182). If she were truly aristocratic in the European sense, she would not have debased herself to this level. By the end of the novel, she has “joined the working classes” as a private secretary and then as an unsuccessful hat maker (226). She may initially have been a part of the “leisure class,” as Elizabeth Ammons notes, but by the end of the novel, she becomes more bourgeois by taking these subordinate, money-making positions (25). Ammons goes so far as to say that the novel “charts Lily’s expulsion from the leisure class” (31). Furthermore, having been disinherited, Lily is forced to live in a “hall bedroom” in a boarding house rather than in the luxury of her late aunt’s house (224). Lily’s capitalistic, bourgeois ventures and even her association with Gryce’s Americana make her a clear symbol of America in Wharton’s novel.

That American nature of Lily’s is the cause of her downfall and reflects Wharton’s conception of the American novelist’s position. Wharton’s own preference for Europe simply could not allow Lily to succeed. Lily does try to stand “absolutely alone,” to use Atherton’s words, but she does so in American terms—through bourgeois capitalism. Had she not been so American, she might not have died at the end of the novel. After all, a more European protagonist would have had aristocratic connections and “old money” to rely upon and likely would never have been placed in Lily’s precarious financial position. Near the middle of the text, the narrator calls Lily and Selden victims of their environment (120). Even as early as the first chapter, Lily is described as “so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate” (8). Since Wharton mirrors herself in Lily, this bondage imagery implies that the American novelist is a victim of his or her own environment. Consequently, only an escape from that environment—as Wharton effected in her own life—will free the novelist from the bourgeois nature of the American novel.

Clearly, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth can be interpreted as containing a symbolic representation of the fate of the American novelist who refuses to seek a “usable past” in Europe. Ammons comments that the novel examines “the dilemma of the young American woman whose objective in life is independence but whose one option is marriage” (38). If Lily is a symbol of the American novelist, then she seeks the ideological and cultural independence of her country—America—but the only option which will bring her success is ideological marriage—to the cultural identity of Europe. Unlike Emerson, who believed that America had “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” Wharton found Europe to possess a valuable cultural base for American novelists (58). Through Lily Bart, Wharton examines the place of the American novelist at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. From Wharton’s viewpoint, Lily Bart’s major flaw, like that of so many American writers of Wharton’s time, is that she simply is too American.

Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia
      Press, 1980.

Atherton, Gertrude. “Why Is American Literature Bourgeois?” Hutner 194-99.

Bell, Millicent. “Edith Wharton in France.” Joslin and Price 61-73.

Brooks, Van Wyck. “On Creating a Usable Past.” Hutner 213-16.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” Hutner 48-58.

Foster, Shirley. “Making It Her Own: Edith Wharton’s Europe.” Joslin and Price 129-45.

Fuller, Margaret. “American Literature.” Hutner 37-48.

Hutner, Gordon. American Literature, American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press,
      1999.

Joslin, Katherine and Alan Price. Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New
      York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1975.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: Norton, 1990.

Whitman, Walt. “Democratic Vistas.” Hutner 121-37.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “Lily Bart and Masquerade Inscribed in the Female Mode.” Joslin and
      Price 259-94.

Wright, Sarah Bird. Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work. New
      York: Facts on File, 1998.